A cursed family, 'Sleepwalking' into disaster

Walking into a movie these days is like walking the plank.

This month, for instance, you have your choice of two family catastrophes ("Snow Angels" opens next Friday), each featuring misery as prelude to tragedy. The misery is mostly internal, which at least makes it possible to distinguish these movies from last week's "Funny Games," about a family tortured by kill-for-thrill weirdos.

It's all become, for me, a blur of homicidal dysfunction, to the point that it's getting hard to keep track of who's murdering whom.

Everyone, though, is suffering. In "Sleepwalking" a streets-department laborer named James (Nick Stahl) takes in his sister (Charlize Theron) when cops bust her dope-dealing husband. (OK, Charlize, you have your Oscar. You can stop playing girls named "Joleen.")

James is soon saddled with sis' teen daughter (AnnaSophia Robb), and when those responsibilities cause him to lose his job, he decides to take the girl to a place of last resort - home.

Home is not where the heart is. It's the horse and cattle farm where he and his sister grew up and were abused by a tyrannical father, an ominous presence in the narrative.

As James and the girl make a long, lazy road trip across the snowy windblown plains, we have time to wonder which stoic, weather-beaten actor will play not-so-dear old dad.

Robert Duvall?

Tommy Lee Jones?

No it's Dennis Hopper in a ten-gallon hat, bringing his crazy-eyed edge to the role.

James hopes that time has softened the old man, but he's wrong. Soon the old guy is throwing punches again, leading to a cathartic showdown.

I'll give this movie credit for one thing - Robb's character is abused, but she's not actually killed, which means that while the movie is a downer, it's not as phenomenally depressing as some of the other titles out there.

"Sleepwalking" is not, however, a movie that generates emotional heat. A girl abandoned by her mother, a father unable to offer anything but hatred to his own children - these are narrative elements of potentially great force, but they play out here without much shape, definition or power. *

Produced by Beth Kono, Charlize Theron, J.J. Harris, A.J. Dix, Rob Merilees and William Shively, directed by William Maher, written by Zac Stanford, music by Christopher Young, distributed by Overture Films.