The Town: Can I date a witness?

Based on a novel by Chuck Hogan, Ben Affleck’s sophomore directorial effort falls in that middle-ground between better than his detractors would presume and worse than his defenders would hope. Among the virtues common to most good heist movies is economy, sticking closely to the mechanics of the scheme while characters develop quietly in the margins. The Town is most problematic when it lingers too long in those margins, especially the fairly preposterous love story between Affleck’s career robber and the bank manager, played by Rebecca Hall, who he and his crew just kidnapped. The crew wore masks so Hall doesn’t realize that Affleck was her kidnapper—this could have been a way more interesting movie if she did and dated him anyway—and enters into a romance with him that consists almost entirely of Dunkin Donuts dates or hanging out at her place and exchanging over-rehearsed monologues about their personal baggage. His obviously, are heavily censored.

None of the central characters feel worth investing in even after they’re ostensibly fleshed out. Jeremy Renner plays Affleck’s partner-in-crime, your token loose cannon—he thinks he’s James Cagney in White Heat, where Affleck thinks he’s James Cagney in Angels Have Dirty Faces—always sniffing around for an excuse to snuff somebody, another adrenaline junky on the heels of Renner’s acclaimed performance in The Hurt Locker, and a character blatantly constructed as a plot device. I was very excited to see Mad Men’s Jon Hamm in a meaty big screen role, but his g-man never gets to do much besides reiterate his cold determination to nail the crooks terrorizing Boston.

Which is arguably the fifth central character in The Town, named after the Charlestown district which the opening title card describes as a Petrie dish for bank robbers, working men dutifully following in their father’s footsteps, contributing whatever small innovations are needed to maintain the family trade over changing times. That makes bank robbing sound somewhat similar to genre filmmaking, but The Town only partially feels like a solid genre exercise. Affleck’s pretty good with the action bits and his camera work shows genuine affection and sensitivity to his fellow actors, but there’s a significant miscalculation as to how many narrative clichés any one movie can carry without buckling over, including the absurd recklessness shown from both the cops and the robbers during the final shoot-out. So take this as a conditional recommendation: The Town is disappointing for its flawed and flabby script, but there’s enough energy generated in the hold-ups, stake-outs and chases to keep you from feeling completely robbed.

Das Kapital und die Komödie

The American present. Commercial pilots are living off food stamps or working in donut shops. A Pennsylvania private juvenile detention centre cuts a deal with the county and keeps kids locked up for months on end for talking back or smoking weed. Corporations take out secret life insurance policies on their employees making the corporation the sole beneficiary when the employee dies, while the family of the deceased spirals into debt trying to cover hospital and funeral expenses. Financial institutions ask for bailouts—you may have heard about this one—while suddenly laid-off workers can’t even get paid for their final shifts. How can such corruption be tolerated? Is there a single overwhelming force facilitating all these aberrations from the Western democratic ideal? Michael Moore has an answer, and it’s a whopper. Let’s just say Francis Fukuyama was soooo wrong.

Coming 20 years after Roger & Me, Moore’s celebrated debut as documentary filmmaker, Capitalism: A Love Story displays much of what makes Moore’s films powerful and enduring in their way. The dumpy, tirelessly muckraking son of a Flint, Michigan autoworker, Moore is the self-appointed spokesman for disgruntled blue collar America, not a theorist with a cushy university post but a resourceful and ambitious people-guy who seems to genuinely like talking to people. (Should they be willing to talk to him, which is not always the case.) What Moore has to say is impassioned, funny, highly entertaining, shamelessly tear-jerking, sometimes insightful, and not especially coherent. In its loosely related assembly of true stories of economic injustice, Capitalism is an engaging and compassionate cri de coeur. In its layman’s explication of certain mystifying financial trends and baffling feats of white collar crime, it goes some distance—a short, but still admirable distance—toward making issues of vital importance to everyone a little more accessible. In its attempts to diagnose the singular underlying cause behind all of these stories the film isn’t just an over-simplification but a confused and opportunistic reading of what ultimately feels like an ideological bogeyman. It’s funny. I’m fairly sure I’m on Moore’s side. I’m not sure I know what the hell he’s getting at.

The messiness of Moore’s argument is evident in his roping of everybody from Roosevelt to Obama to Wallace Shawn to Jesus into his back-up band. He actually gets a bunch of priests to say that capitalism is un-Christian!, which I guess might make sense if interpreted as a bald play on the spiritual conscience of the Christian Right—hardly a terribly Catholic bunch—though I have a hard time seeing them in line at the multiplex. When Moore finally gets around to ideological alternatives his discussion of socialism is equally vague and inclusive, offering no clear positive examples of other nations making a sustained go at it and mostly just falling back on championing labour unions. The examples he offers of average Americans overcoming economic injustice are truly inspiring, but they don’t actually show how capitalism in its essence is an inherent obstacle. Still, you should see the movie. You’ll have a good time with it and quite possibly learn something from the details. Just don’t expect to walk away with a thesis. The theorists were always better with those anyway.

Men at Work: Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match and A Hell of a Note arrive on DVD

As the studio-backed auteur films of the 1970s climbed into the stratosphere, those delirious heights from which the whole heady shotgun wedding of art and commerce would soon come crashing down, another American cinema slowly emerged from the rich soil of the marginalized. Independent movies of this second golden age were so often “regional,” if not in geography than in spirit, showing us faces, places and activity typically ignored and doing so through an industrial model infinitely more modest than the one available to the movie brats who conquered Hollywood. These movies were made cheaply and required tireless work, often made on weekends between regular jobs over very long periods of time. Maybe that’s partly why so many of the lasting images of the independents from the 70s concern men at work. From Peter Falk’s convivial crew in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) to Henry Sanders’ inward abattoir labourer in Killer of Sheep (77), blue-collar life and the poles of wild times and desperate dreams of transcendence it engenders found a new and often exhilarating level of expression. Yet one of the most indelible and entertaining examples of the working man’s movie, one that’s genuinely regional in every sense of the term—save racially—has been long forgotten and is only now making a celebrated return.

Watchmaker Film has lovingly packaged the first DVD release of The Whole Shootin’ Match (78), the feature debut of a scrawny Texan named Eagle Pennell, accompanied by A Hell of a Note (77), his 25-minute dry run which showcases the same inspired comic pairing of actors Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman. Authenticity is a precarious word to throw around when discussing movies, but if we invoke it to describe how temperament and tendencies reflect content, than Pennell’s the real thing. He told stories about strangely lovable—and occasionally detestable—losers, dreamers and drinkers whose shaggy charm could never be accused of benefiting from excess polish. And these films, reputedly constructed from single takes, sometimes under-lit, sometimes overexposed, radiate ramshackle enthusiasm. There are bits of humour in Pennell’s work, not to mention certain images of vast landscapes or gloomy bars, that are so instantly winning, yet they’d never satisfy the technical or storytelling standards of even the most slouching film academy. They exude faith in the pleasures of watching human behaviour and in only the most mundane forms of catharsis, blotchy black and white and boom shadows be damned. Their narratives are the narratives of country songs, and they speak to the inner life of the labourer. In one memorable scene, a character watches a movie and sincerely wonders what the director does for a living.

A Hell of a Note announces the sense of flow that is Pennell’s modus operandi. It’s first sequence finds Davis and Perryman resigning from roof tarring in a marvelously fluid gesture: they both whip it out and piss on the as-yet un-tarred roof, their streams of urine converging into a creeping puddle heading strait toward the boots of their cranky and imminently former employer. They then head to a bar to drown sorrows, meet girls, get in awesomely awkward fights, dance, and ponder new opportunities. A sudden injection of tragedy brings it all to a grinding halt, but most of A Hell of a Note is cyclical and un-dramatic, the sense of inevitability kept buoyant by often sublime gags and an endearing undercurrent of friendship declared.

This is even more the case with The Whole Shootin’ Match, which features no such tragic conclusion but rather builds up to a moment of clarity, or at least as close to one as this hillbilly Hope and Crosby can hope to approximate. Loyd (Perryman) and Frank (Davis) have evidently been pals a long while, having collaborated in a number of failed get-rich-quick schemes, everything from a flying squirrel farm to the chinchilla business. Things kick off as Loyd proposes another dazzling new enterprise: polyurethane. Hang onto your hats.

The distinctions between Perryman and Davis’ characters are more pronounced here. Loyd is the persistent optimist and inventor. One of my favourite scenes conveys Loyd’s silent glee over his crafting of a spinning wand that makes bubbles. Frank is the philandering family man whose innate cheerfulness and obvious love of Loyd keep him within safe distance of depression and complete alcoholic collapse. As the story ambles on its way, with more bars, fights, dancing, drinking and working en route, Loyd and Frank are teased by success when Loyd’s new super-mop—he has a revelation in an automated car wash—gets picked up by a local manufacturer who gives them a whopping $1000 just for signing a contract. You can probably guess how things turn out. The final sequence finds them looking for Indian treasure in the hills outside Austin and coming to what feels like some sort of fork in the road, even if neither of them is entirely cognizant of the fact.

Perryman and Davis embody the dreams of those Americans who feel alienated by the larger society they inhabit yet never stop trying, in that deeply American way, to beat the system. Pennell connected with his characters so strongly that his own story came to resemble theirs even as he revealed an artistic vision never granted to them. Pennell nurtured a legend of failed potential all too aligned with his body of work, and he died, following years of drinking, professional and personal self-sabotage, and even intermittent homelessness, in July of 2002. He was just shy of 50. It’s a shame he didn’t stick around long enough to see what sort of success his good ol’ boys would achieve. His best work survives and will continue to do so. 

Ballast: death, family, responsibility, and the precarious art of aestheticizing poverty

Ballast begins with one self-inflected death, that of Lawrence’s brother Darius, and it might have been two if it weren’t for the kindly neighbour being nearby and calling in Lawrence’s suicide attempt, a gunshot to the chest that pierced his lung but failed to deliver him from this altogether bleak and newly lonesome rural Mississippi winter. Lawrence’s remaining behind after his brother’s death feels either a betrayal of some biological contract or the completion of some ruthless process of deterministic reduction. Lawrence and Darius, you see, were twins, and Darius, unamicably estranged from his wife and son, has left Lawrence alone and with much to resolve. So Ballast becomes a story of ambiguous responsibility, and forgiveness too, and, more subtly, identity asserting itself by force of fate.

The clouds hold rain and the people hold massive emotions, but the movie is, for the most part, rigorously unassuming. Writer/director/producer Lance Hammer’s valiantly self-distributed feature debut was a critical favourite at Sundance a year back, and, really, you have to figure that sheer austerity and the mere presentation of impoverished African-Americans had more than a little to do with that. The camera work, courtesy of Lol Crawley, is hand-held but shot on 35 mm, with a striking beauty to its expansive overcast landscapes and stark compositions. The rhythms are jarring and the jump cuts made even terser by the utter absence of any musical scoring. The talk is most often subdued, and at times the whispered mumbling is almost perversely obscure. This world of rattling trains and strip malls in the middle of nowhere, of wood paneling and track pants, of bottled-up despair and readily available guns, vividly evokes the lives of so many Americans that rarely make it into the movies. It all makes an impression, but I guess I just have to say that at times it also feels generic, like these characters and this approach are closer to elegantly selected tropes than to the unadorned reality that Hammer seems to be striving for.

Lawrence (Michael J. Smith Sr.) is but one third of Ballast’s centre. James (JimMyron Ross) is his nephew and Marlee (Tarra Riggs) his sister-in-law, that is, the family Darius left him with. They mightn’t have had any reason to communicate, much less reconcile, if it weren’t for James’ involvement in the local crack-peddling scene, thus the need for Lawrence’s gun, and Marlee’s discovery that Darius bequeathed to her his half of the house and convenience store business he shared with Lawrence. Neither party initially sees any opportunity in the inheritance, but economics and, one guesses, a lingering sense of familial duty, driven by desperation, will make picking up the pieces of the business and moving into the house seem more inviting than trying to sell everything off for what will surely be a pittance.

Of course the relationships I’ve just described are in some sense spoilers. Hammer lets us in on how these characters interconnect in a strictly piecemeal fashion—this is very much in keeping with the movie’s style and doesn’t feel needlessly withholding or gimmicky—but it’s difficult to say much about Ballast without setting these bare facts straight. So many things are broken or breaking at the onset of this story, and it is these points of connection between people that provides the only traces of hope. Yet it’s in these very connection points that Ballast reveals its limitations. Some of the moments shared by Lawrence and James resonate intensely, an effect only heightened by masculine codes of reserve and by the bracing emotional residue of Darius’ departure. Moments shared by either of these guys and Marlee however prove more problematic. Riggs gets stuck with the movie’s most awkward bits of dialogue. One scene finds her coming home after losing her job, nearly hysterical as she launches into a short monologue about how being black and poor renders her invisible in the work place. This scene is an especially strong example of how Ballast, for all its understated tone, can be both overly expository and didactic.

Am I coming down too hard on this handsome, well crafted and let’s say a little too earnest independent? My intention isn’t to bully the underdog but to simply acknowledge that the careful nurturing of a sensibility isn’t quite the same thing as actually telling a story in the most honest way. I was engaged in Ballast. It certainly looks like a movie I like. (Am I too suspicious of movies that look too tailored to me tastes?) But I also felt left outside of it, as though it were more a type than a specific thing. I encourage you to see it, and to disagree.

The war at home: Gran Torino

Gran Torino can be read as a sort of western, and not just because of the immense presence of its iconic director and star. Maybe Walt Kowalski (Clint Eastwood) is an old soldier looking for a new war. He served in Korea, worked most of his life at a Ford plant, raised kids who are now middle class twerps and virtually estranged. He’s newly widowed, but continues to live alone, save his pooch, in the family house in some corroded suburb in the industrial wasteland of Detroit, where he mows the lawn, does small repairs, sucks back can after can of Pabst Blue Ribbon on the porch, and works hard to keep others away, sometimes with a snarl and a growl, sometimes with a gun. Always with a string of racist slurs.

But Gran Torino, written by Nick Schenk, is among other things the story of Walt’s redemption. Thanks partly to the awkward machinations of the script, but thanks to a greater degree to Eastwood’s particular integrity, this redemption will not come easily. Walt’s encounters with his Hmong immigrant neighbours, the kids especially, will force him to bust his cloistered existence. Teenage siblings Sue (Ahney Her, who tends to swallow her words but is so utterly the character) and Thao (Bee Vang) engage Walt, the former through smart talk, a preternatural insight into curmudgeonly psychology and offerings of delicious Hmong chow, the latter by trying to steal Walt’s prized Gran Torino under pressure from his gangbanger cousins. Walt finds new purpose as Sue and Thao’s protector and will ultimately stop at nothing to ensure they get a fighting chance to wriggle free of the ghetto. He’s an old hand at intimidation, so why should some stupid punks with tattoos and guns worry him? I can’t claim that I buy how it all goes down, but that doesn’t meant it’s not a story worth telling.

Eastwood manipulates his star image brilliantly. He knows the audience sees Dirty Harry up there, that we associate him with vengeance and vigilantism, and he lets all these extra-filmic elements hover around him and feed the tension. Though his directorial work can sometimes slip into implausibility and half-baked sentiment, Eastwood likes his stories tough. And he’s that rare mainstream American filmmaker who tries to make movies about what it means to live in America today. This alone is a reason to if not treasure at least respect his body of work. Rather than mindlessly celebrate his country’s puffed-up triumphalism, Gran Torino surveys a corner of the US that resembles a third world shit hole more than some glorious embodiment of ambition and affluence.

Whatever promise of a better world can be gleaned in Gran Torino must be found in the margins, in the implication that even the least tolerant of us, the disdainful dinosaurs who cling to antiquated notions of masculinity and tribalism, might be lured back into active engagement with others. The film trades in cliché. It cheats here and there to get Walt to the finish line. But Walt himself, which is to say Eastwood the conservative closet humanist, is never less than riveting, and it’s the throwaway moments he shares with his unexpected new friends that are the film’s finest and most affecting. There might just be hope for my cranky old uncle Rick yet. I just hope the movie plays in Gananoque, Ontario, so he can see it. 

The long and winding road: A conversation with independent film producer Jim Stark

Jim Stark occupies the unlikely position of independent film producer. Originally from Ohio, he’s based in Manhattan, though most of his contacts are in Europe, South America or Asia. He’s helped some of the landmark indie films of the 1980s get made and get seen. Most recently he produced and co-wrote the Charles Bukowski adaptation Factotum, a movie about a guy who accepts and abandons a seemingly endless string of jobs. I spoke with Stark on behalf of Vue Weekly about his own string of jobs, the many roles he’s inhabited in a career of making the sort of movies that, as Stark says, “no one makes for the money.”

Vue Weekly: Your film career begins with Jim Jarmusch’s early features. Did you guys know each other from Ohio?

Jim Stark: No, I was a corporate lawyer in New York and had met his girlfriend Sara Driver, who’s also a filmmaker. She approached me, and I got involved in Stranger Than Paradise, which starred my 86-year-old grandmother, among other people. She plays Aunt Lotte. Some people think she steals the movie.

VW: Had you been practicing law long?

JS: About four or five years, doing mostly corporate litigation, trademark, contracts, intellectual property stuff. Jim and Sara needed help on this movie and they couldn’t afford to pay anybody. The last person Jim wanted to meet was a corporate lawyer, but we were both from Ohio, both Indians fans. We got along well and worked on the film together for a couple of years, which turned into a surprising success. He made some others I was involved in—Down By Law, Mystery Train, Night on Earth—and then made somewhat bigger films, where I wanted to stay doing what I was doing. I’ve worked with a number of different directors since.

VW: Did you always have aspirations to work in film?

JS: I took film classes as a teenager. I was very interested in European films, much more than American films. I spent a week at USC until I realized that, at that point, there was no use in getting a film degree. So I returned to New York and went to law school.

VW: Once into film, were you happy producing or hoping to be involved more creatively?

JS: I enjoyed being involved in the process of making movies, particularly starting at the beginning. Some I’ve had more creative involvement in, some less. I had a tiny bit of creative involvement in Stranger and Down By Law, but as time went on Jim insisted that he make all the creative decisions. With other directors, I’ve been more involved in terms of casting, editing or, in a couple of cases, writing. My entrée into this was through being able to organize things and get the money, push the project through to completion, which is often the hardest part.

VW: Cold Fever was your first screenplay. How did that come about?

JS: Mystery Train was invited to the Reykjavík Film Festival. Jim, not being a big Festival guy, didn’t want to go, but I’d always been fascinated by Iceland, so we asked if they’d invite the producer. They would have taken the gaffer, because not so many people come up to Iceland, so off I went. The airport’s about 40 minutes outside Reykjavík, and the landscape is this sort of unbelievable moonscape of lava fields. I’d never seen anything like it. For somebody who does road movies, it was like a billion dollars in free production design. By the time I got into town I really wanted to make a movie there. I’d enjoyed working with Masatoshi Nagase on Mystery Train and somehow these two ideas got entwined in my head: I thought, I’m going to do a movie about a Japanese guy who comes to Iceland and goes on the road! Anyway, I had a good experience collaborating with Fridrik Fridriksson, but that was my only writing experience until I met Bent Hamer, who already had this idea to film Charles Bukowski’s Factotum.

VW: The novel’s quite episodic. Was it an arduous adaptation?

JS: The biggest challenge was to give the film multiple layers. When you read the book, it’s just full of ironic observations; if you take away the descriptions, and just show what’s going on, you don’t get a feeling for this man’s keen intelligence. That’s why we inserted the poetry, which is largely from sources other than Factotum.

VW: What about updating the novel from the ‘40s to the present?

JS: It’s funny. I had people telling me nobody drinks anymore, it should be about drugs. Well, these people don’t get out much. I remember the last night we were shooting in a rooming house, and as I was sitting on this very decrepit furniture in the hall, these people would come out, use the communal toilet and go back into their tiny rooms, living very much the life Bukowski was describing. When we took a break, somebody came in and stole all our liquor bottles.

VW: The sense of alcoholism and loneliness is addressed quite differently in Factotum than it is in Barfly (the 1987 film written by Bukowski). I wonder if that doesn’t have something to do with Hamer being from Norway, where alcoholism is less veiled in the culture.

JS: Probably. I drink very little, but Bent, as you pointed out, comes from a society where drinking’s very much the norm. He was fascinated from the beginning about alcoholism and what it takes to stay there, the work involved.

VW: Did Bukowski’s concerns resonate with you?

JS: I was very admiring of his style. I wasn’t as attracted to the lifestyle, as many fans of his are. Neither Bent nor I were Bukowski fanatics, and I’ve run into a bunch of those since we started with this. We had our own take on it. For me, what was most interesting was this need of Bukowski’s to reject all of the trappings of bourgeois society, not to have a house, not to have a job, not to have a relationship, because all of these things will interfere with and cheapen your art, that to be a real artist means to be an outsider.

VW: Factotum premiered in spring 2005, finally opened in US theatres in autumn 2006, and, as we speak, is still making the rounds. Is it draining to sit through this protracted process of watching a film get distributed?

JS: Well, people think that everything that happens in a movie happens on the set, but that’s not making the movie. It’s the year or two or more before, the script, the casting, pre-production, financing. Then a year of post-production, editing, sound, all the technical work to get a finished print. Then it circulates for a year, year-and-a-half, sometimes more. Canada’s not the last country. I think they’re waiting for Factotum in Japan. Then there’s licensing, DVD, and later re-licensing ... it goes on forever. But it’s always been this way. It’s just a little harder now. You just have to get out there, try and get people to see it, to be interested in it, because no one’s going to do it for you. 

Asleep at the wheel

It’s long been fashionable amongst critics to disparage American indie films that locate themselves in smaller, economically marginalized communities. Such settings are often regarded as a cynical trope, as though the mere vision of a trailer, run-down duplex or wood-paneled diner were enough to gain a film entry into Sundance. This attitude toward the use of a milieu that, let’s face it, a hell of a lot of people actually live in, is irksome. A lousy movie is a lousy movie, whether set in Beverly Hills or in the shantytowns of hillbillies, and I for one welcome any movie that expands our imaginative landscape to include all manner of geography and class. Yet in the case of Sleepwalking, we’re confronted with a movie that wears its small town despair like an impenetrable suit of armour, which is to say it’s an airless, self-consciously slumming affair, and is admittedly just the sort of thing that should send those antipathetic to the blue collar blues into fits of vehement dismissal.

Sleepwalking was written by Zac Stanford (Chumscrubber) and marks the directorial debut of Bill Maher. It opens with single mom Joleen (co-producer Charlize Theron, most recently embodying dinge in North Country and Monster) getting busted for running a grow-op out of her house in some bitterly cold corner of Northern California. With her place getting gutted by the fuzz, Joleen barges her way into the hovel of her pushover brother James (Nick Stahl) with her rightfully pissed-off preteen daughter Tara (AnnaSophia Robb) in tow. After drowning her sorrows and scoring some action from an anonymous good ol’ boy (a bit-part sadly played by the far too talented Callum Keith Rennie), Joleen abandons James and Tara with no forwarding address.

Tara is soon whisked away from James’ dump to an even more depressing dump of a Foster Home, and just in time too: James is not only fired but evicted soon after, forced to sleep on the floor in a buddy’s basement. If things weren’t bad enough, James, with barely enough cash to fill the tank, then deduces that his only recourse is to abduct Tara and hit the road. Stahl has no problem imbuing James with a convincing balance of dopey sweetness and poor judgment, but his implausibly stupid choices as the film goes along reek of dramaturgical convenience. By the time he gets to visiting his unsurprisingly evil old pa (Dennis Hopper, performing the perverse shtick he can do in his sleep), who unsurprisingly abuses both James and Tara, the story becomes perfectly exasperating.

We often mock movies in which, for example, some struggling university student transplanted from a modest Midwest farming community lives in some wildly expansive Manhattan loft. We roll our eyes at how movies seem so out of touch with the relationship between income and real estate, as though the affluence of Hollywood bigwigs renders them oblivious to the standards by which the rest of us live. But the reverse problem can be just as risible. The places where people live in Sleepwalking feel, not overly cramped (the crew does have to fit somewhere), but overly emphatic in their white trash squalor. James’ dark, dank apartment, with its unfinished walls, might turn off a discerning crackhead, but it fits all too well into Sleepwalking’s low-rent drudgery schematics, which are so demanding that they don’t even allow James to pay his rent, even though he performs not un-lucrative roadwork and seems to harbour no vices whatsoever that might exhaust his funds.

The fact that Sleepwalking is so relentlessly bleak is a problem mainly because it finally gets in the way of storytelling. Despite the efforts of a largely laudable cast (young Robb included), the movie just never seems to move, so bogged down in faux realism that it can’t work up the energy to convey even a fleeting sense of genuine joy in the escape plan James and Tara enact. (The incongruous pool sequence most certainly doesn’t count.) With no plausibly urgency to the characters’ desperation, no plausible hope to contrast their despair, Sleepwalking finally feels as shapeless and unengaged as its title.