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SLEEPERS

[1996. Directed by Barry Levinson. Cast: Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Brad Pitt. Warner Bros. 150 mins.]

Barry Levinson's latest film works from the questionable assumption that the only way to get justice is to dispense with justice. But this breach of moral reasoning isn't quite as far a stretch as it might originally seem. After all, last year's ode to revenge, Seven, worked from this same philosophical territory with the added advantage of ravioli by the gallons.

The premise behind Levinson's Sleepers is so amoral, it defies logic. Indeed, the films premise is so improbable it defies suspension of disbelief. It's therefore a good thing that Levinson has loaded himself up with an all-star cast to make the cinematic going a little easier.

Sleepers, based on the recent best-seller by Lorenzo Carcaterra, is the story of four Heli's Kitchen juvenile delinquents who get caught up in the legal system after a prank backfires on them. They're sent to the Wilkinson School for Boys on the presumption that a year of reform school will straighten them out. What no one counts on is sadistic guard, Sean Nokes (Kevin Bacon). A pathological bad egg who makes the criminals and gangsters in this movie seem like paragons of virtue, Nokes inflicts a battery of physical and psychological damage on the boys that they will never forget.

To make a long story short, Nokes meets this quartet in the mid-1960s and he re-meets Tommy (Ron Eldard) and John (Billy Crudup) by accident over a 1981 late-night blue plate special. It's Nokes' bad luck because Tommy and John have become professional criminals due to the trauma they suffered at Wilkinson. Naturally, Tommy and John gun Nokes down over his chopped steak - in front of a handful of witnesses, no less - and both are eventually bound over for Murder One.

Enter old friend, Michael (Brad Pitt), who has parlayed his frustration into a law degree and set himself up as an Assistant District Attorney. Trying to figure out a way to nail the blue meanies at the reform school, he gets himself assigned to his friends' case (pardon the fact that this is both a criminal offense and grounds for disbarment) so that he can play both judicial sides off the middle. Michael's life ambition is to get his pals off the hook while putting Wilkinson's guards firmly on the hook.

Through this whole period we're being narrated by Lorenzo (Jason Patric), nicknamed "Shakes" (for Shakespeare), because he has an urge to write stories. It's through Shakes' voice-over that we eventually find out the boys' resident parish Priest, Father Bobby (Robert De Niro), will condemn himself to hell by committing perjury; while local Mafioso Don, King Vito (Vittorio Gassman), and Shakes manipulate the restaurant witnesses so their two street toughs can beat their rap. Well, Shakes does wan us at the movie's beginning that the neighborhood would take care of its own.

So what's not to believe?

Doesn't this film reflect how authority figures really act under pressure?

Fortunately for Levinson, he's been studying his recent film history. His remarkably involved tale offers baroque Big Apple flourishes of Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, and Sergio Leone, with cinematographic touches courtesy of Oliver Stone and an ensemble of known thousands as favored by Quentin Tarantino. In fact, the film's so powerfully persuasive despite the improbability of its historical accuracy, the theater audience would probably vote for a dismissal if put on the spot.

Levinson's also lucky that Dustin Hoffman has snapped back to form as rummy lawyer, Danny Snyder. Crafting the only believable performance in the film, Hoffman's lost cause of an alcoholic defense attorney keeps Sleepers viable long enough for us to ignore the passing parade of narrative shaggy dogs working their way through the script.

Long on atmospheric detail and short on reasonable morality, Sleepers accomplishes the not inconsiderable feat of overturning the tables of truth and justice in favor of the side of mendacity and corruption. If Levinson's premise is that there are some evils so heinous that further evil is required - and should be actively endorsed by those in positions of trust - then we're all in for a long, hard haul.

You see, Shakes has got to be one smart cookie in the final analysis. For he's cashing in, of course, on his friends' trust to reveal their petty deceitfulness. Perhaps that nickname isn't such a bad fit for this clever vigilante.

THEREMIN: AN ELECTRONIC ODYSSEY

[1994. Directed by Steven M. Martin. Cast: León Theremin, Clara Rockmore, Klaatu and Gort, Todd the Runt and The Beach Boys. Orion Films/Orion Home Video. 84 mins.]

Lev Termen's Iife story is so weird, it has to be fiction. Although, unfortunately for him, it isn't fiction. The even ts depicted in Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey did realIy occur and he did live them out ... but only barely.

A young Russian electronic genius who happened to figure out how to rig a bunch of vacuum tubes in such a fashion as to create a celestial-sounding instrument, Termen was fated to lead a life of musical fame; involuntary cloaks and daggers; and, finally, absent-minded destitution. His "theremin" - a wood console consisting of radio tubes hooked to a horizontal loop and vertical antenna that's activated by the arching sweeps of its musician's hand - has a melancholy violinish sound that comes across either menacing (as used by Bernard Herrmann in Robert V[?]'s 1951 The Day the Earth Stood Still) or joyful (as used by Brian Wilson in his timeless pop tune epic, "Good Vibrations").

In the course of fifteen years, Termen played his electronic strument for Nikolai Lenin (that 1922 concert would have been a sight to see) before he moved his act to NYC as Leon Thereminw'here he and his protégé, Clara Rockmore, wowed them at Carnegie Hall. Termen had just enough time left over to marry Caribbean ballerina Lavinia Wilkins before he was kidnapped by the Soviet KGB in broad daylight and was forced to disappear for the next two decades. His friends didn't know if he was alive or dead. Wilkins never saw or heard from her husband before her death.

Termen finally resurfaced in Moscow after spending a futile couple of decades trying to build the proverbial Buck Rogers laser beam out of his sound machine. Unfortunately, his reviews were bad. Still, rather than simply rub him out, the KGB figured he was a dotty old Merlin and let him loose in a local music conservatory. Termen therefore managed to survive Stalin and Beria's reign of terror despite wandering around in the innermost of inner circles, and he eventually made his way back West to live out his final years in a bit of a fog.

History, however, has its odd way of winding around in circles and the theremin still has a respectable place in the avant-garde of classical music (mostly through the efforts of Rockmore whose performances in this film are uniquely talented and of inspired brilliance). Likewise, in the hands of Henry Cowell, Robert Moog, Todd Rundgren, and Edgar d Varese, the machine has been adapted for multipurposed use. Its ethereal, disembodied soprano still crops up from time to time for its novel sound.

In a phrase, the instrument has survived its quirky creator.

Documentaries like Theremin: Art Electronic Odyssey don't come around often. Then again, lives Ike Termen's don't happen often. As his remarkable adventures show us, his life's odyssey took a staggering toll upon him and his loved ones. We only get a whiff of what he must have felt in creating a timbre that stands unique in the annals of 20th-century science, music, and politics. But what an oddly bittersweet whiff it is.

RATING KEY
Acting
Cinematography
Direction
Editing La
Narrative
Sound
Special Effects
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