Spring Break
Sleepwalking film review
Liza Atamy
Issue date: 3/13/08 Section: Student Culture
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Written by Zac Stanford and directed by Bill Maher, the film follows the life of 11-year-old Tara (AnnaSophia Robb) and her struggle to comprehend and come to terms with her mother abandoning her.
Forced out of her home after her boyfriend is arrested, Joleen Reedy (Theron) turns to her timid brother James (Stahl) for shelter.
A brief amount of time passes until Joleen is off with a new boyfriend, leaving her daughter in James' care.
It is in this moment when the viewer is introduced to the actual foundation of the story: the developing bond between James and Tara and how their impact on each other plays a substantial role in their lives.
The movie, produced by Theron, features an array of themes: the longing for love and acceptance, perpetual familial bond, the overshadowing of one's past into the present and the resilience that is needed to overcome the neglected insecurities that lurk in one's subconscious.
The story is an ongoing record of one arduous circumstance after another, and highlights how much an individual can endure before inevitably breaking down.
The scenes were drawn out and felt suffocating to watch at times.
A good example to paint somewhat of the claustrophobia I felt while viewing the film was Joleen's unstable, bipolar attitude and her meager cries for attention from men. Perhaps it was the abnormal relationship she had with her abusive father that made her insecure and vie for a man's acknowledgement. Nevertheless, I was agitated that she did absolutely nothing to try to come to terms with her emotional instability and instead tuned it out by offering herself far too little and running away from her problems.
Another scene that had my teeth clenching, and my impatience increasing, was James and Tara's trip to Utah to visit Grandpa Reedy (Dennis Hopper). It felt as if more than half of the movie consisted of their trip to visit a miserable excuse for a human being that lacked any kind of compassion.
I couldn't fathom why James would want to revisit and relive all of the moments that made the Reedy siblings runaway from home in the first place.
One may argue it was the trip, along with Tara, that finally gave James the courage to stand up to his demons, but the whole concept didn't seem realistic to me.
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