REVIEW: Sleepers (1996)
Sleepers
Rated: R
Runtime: 147 minutes
Starring: Kevin Bacon, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Minnie Driver, Brad Pitt.
My Rating: Three stars.
Your Rating (Click stars to rate):
This film appears on the surface to be a rough-and-tough mobster movie about revenge.
But Sleepers is a lot smarter than that.
From the opening dialog, you know this isn't really a mobster movie. Lorenzo (Jason Patric) narrates, retelling this story from sometime after it has ended. He says, “I'm the only one who can speak for them and the children we were,” as the film opens showing four boys dancing and laughing to muted music. Then, blackness, as the secondary cast credits scroll.
It's a bold declaration for a movie two and a half hours long. It's either going to be really good, or really boring and preachy. Sleepers is on the really good side of the spectrum, barely.
In the Summer of 1967, four boys start working for mobster headman King Benny (Vittorio Gassman). Benny pays off cops, deals drugs, and has people he doesn't like disappear. The boys are just looking for some extra cash and spend most of the Summer fooling around and pulling pranks.
Their best conceived prank is to steal hot dogs from a corner vendor. The prank goes awry when the kids actually steal the whole stand and bring it to the edge of the subway stairwell. They're hoping to let it go just as the vendor catches them and watch him struggle to save it. The cart is too heavy for the boys and it careens down the staircase, seriously injuring a man at the bottom. The ensuing court trial sends them to a juvenile detention center where they are tortured and raped for a year. Now, 10 years later, they're out for revenge.
Barry Levinson (also of Rain Man) directs this adaptation of the best-selling book by the same name. It's tag line is “When friendship runs deeper than blood.”
Sleepers is about the paths we take and the choices we make. The four boys simply made a mistake. After being tortured and sexually assaulted by Sean Nokes (Kevin Bacon) and the rest of the guards at the Wilkensen Center, they're left with two choices. They can either lead a life of crime or try to carry out a normal life. Tommy (Billy Crudup) and John (Ron Eldard) choose crime, Lorenzo becomes a reporter, and Michael (Brad Pitt) is a lawyer.
Tommy and John find Nokes sitting in a restaurant and immediately kill him with four witnesses. Michael takes the case as the prosecutor and Danny Snyder (Dustin Hoffman) is the defense attorney. The plan is to find a way to get Tommy and John off and simultaneously expose the Wilkensen Center.
The boys vowed never to discuss the Wilkensen horrors, but now they have a chance to take down their past and all who destroyed their childhood. Their whole plan rests on a decision between loyalty and morals for Father Bobby (Robert De Niro), a priest who's asked to lie for Tommy and John.
So does friendship run deeper than blood? Well, what does that really mean anyway? The four boys are closer than brothers. And since they shared the same traumatic experience, they all want revenge equally. It doesn't come in the way most crime families plan it. This is with the brains, which is what makes Sleepers a better story than films in the same genre.
But I'm looking at more than the story. I consistently wavered on the edge of “is this a good movie” or “does this movie think it is a great movie.” It's as risky a place to be as the ledge from where the boys teetered that hot dog stand.
There are times in the film where the script reads like it's supposed to be Gospel. I was a bit put-off by that. Also, do we really need a 72-minute set-up to the real heart of the film? There is something to be said for subtlety, but Sleepers makes sure to hammer its points home, sometimes with a baton.
It tries to make the four boys appear good and honorable, but I had a hard time buying into it. They play stupid pranks that are often highly disrespectful, and then they rely on adults to bail them out. That said, being tortured in a juvenile center isn't warranted.
To further try to influence my view of the boys, I'm bombarded with full orchestra music at every moment of redemption, no matter how minor. Sleepers was nominated for a "Best Music" Academy Award in 1997. I found the score overbearing most of the time.
I just didn't feel much sympathy for Tommy and John when they find and kill Nokes as adults and go to trail for it. John, they tell you, is suspected in four other unsolved murders. Did Wilkensen provoke all of that? It doesn't explain why their hatred for the guards was funneled into homicides, while the other two had productive lives. The 10-year gap leaves a lot of questions.
The acting is good with Dustin Hoffman giving the best performance as a burned-out alcoholic lawyer. Pitt is tolerable and Bacon doesn't get in the way. I guess it's as much as you can ask. Three stars.
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