MOVIE MUSIC UK

THROWBACK THIRTY

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

Sleepers is a dark crime drama directed by Barry Levinson, adapted by Levinson from Lorenzo Carcaterra’s controversial 1995 book of the same name. Set initially in 1960s Hell’s Kitchen, New York, the story follows four inseparable boys whose lives are destroyed after a foolish prank involving a stolen hot-dog cart ends with a man being badly injured. Sent to the Wilkinson Home for Boys, they are subjected to horrific physical and sexual abuse by several guards, led by the sadistic Sean Nokes. Years later, two of the boys – now hardened criminals – unexpectedly encounter Nokes and kill him, setting in motion an elaborate scheme involving their childhood friends to manipulate the subsequent murder trial and finally exact revenge on the men who tormented them.

Levinson was already one of Hollywood’s most respected filmmakers, having made Diner, The Natural, Good Morning, Vietnam, Avalon, and Bugsy, while his 1988 drama Rain Man won him the Academy Award for Best Director. For Sleepers he assembled an extraordinary cast: Jason Patric, Brad Pitt, Billy Crudup, and Ron Eldard play the adult friends, while Robert De Niro appears as their neighborhood priest Father Bobby, Dustin Hoffman plays alcoholic attorney Danny Snyder, and Kevin Bacon gives an especially unpleasant performance as Nokes. Interestingly, while Carcaterra’s manuscript attracted intense Hollywood interest before publication, the book’s claim to be based on actual events subsequently became controversial, with journalists and New York institutions questioning whether the story could be independently verified, although Carcaterra continued to maintain that the essential events were true. Whatever the truth of the matter, the film was a critical success and grossed over $165.6 million at the worldwide box office.

The score for Sleepers was, perhaps a little unexpectedly, written by the legendary John Williams. By the mid-1990s he had intentionally begun taking on work that increasingly moved away from the sci-fi action adventures that made his name and towards darker adult dramas including Presumed Innocent, JFK, Schindler’s List, and Nixon. Sleepers, his only film score of 1996 and his first collaboration with Levinson, fits squarely within this period, although stylistically it remains one of the most unusual scores he ever wrote.

What immediately distinguishes Sleepers from other classic John Williams works is its rather bleak urban sound. Williams combines orchestra and piano with significantly more prominent electronics – synthesizers, electronic bass, percussion, processed voices, and abrasive metallic textures – to create music that frequently seems to exist inside the traumatized minds of the boys at the center of the story. It’s not a depiction of 1960s New York per se – this is a story that could have taken place almost anywhere – so Williams’s music is less concerned with the setting or the time period than with the harsh and dark emotions felt by the teenage protagonists.

“Sleepers at Wilkinson” establishes this atmosphere immediately, offsetting moody strings, lonely brass, and meandering woodwind lines against rumbling electronic tones and the thrum of an electric bass guitar. It creates a somber, introverted, somewhat dour mood that matches the emotional expectations of the story, but makes for tough listening. The action music in the second half of the cue is similarly abrasive, and has much in common with aforementioned scores like Presumed Innocent and JFK, being mostly concerned with rhythms and pulses.

“Hell’s Kitchen” offers the score’s most substantial orchestral statement of the brooding main theme, in which a metronomic piano line keeps time under light, airy woodwinds performing a series of broken, searching, minor-key phrases, before eventually becoming more energetic and dramatic as it develops. The whole thing cleverly captures both the friendship at the heart of the story and the dangerous streets of the neighborhood in which they grew up. One thing to mention about the theme: it’s got that very particular John Williams jazz sound, albeit transferred to a larger orchestra, and it’s full of familiar little gestures and techniques from the Williams canon, but it’s also very difficult to get hold of in terms of its immediacy and memorability, and it’s only in the final minute or so of the cue that it properly resolves into something stirringly consonant. This lack of obviousness is something that may frustrate listeners who prefer their Williams themes to smack them in the face and be easy to whistle. This is not that type of score.

“The Football Game” is one of the score’s highlights. It underscores a scene at the facility where the boys participate in an annual guards-versus-inmates football game, and humiliate their captors by winning, resulting in brutal retribution. Williams scores the scene as though it were the most important sporting event in history – which, to the boys, it was – and writes a terrific, aggressive, bombastically rhythmic scherzo driven by piano, bass, electronic percussion, and punchy brass figures. It has an almost Schifrin-esque 1970s swagger in places, but the rhythmic complexity and brass writing are unmistakably Williams, and although it starts slowly, it builds up a massive head of steam as it develops. This is perhaps the closest Williams has come to writing orchestral rock music.

The subsequent “Saying the Rosary” could hardly be more different, employing solemn Latinate choral writing, sampled church organs, tolling bells, dulcimer, and eerily slow-moving, woodwind-led orchestral textures to evoke the trappings of Catholic ritual while simultaneously suggesting fear and impending tragedy.

“The Trip to Wilkinson” reintroduces the menacing electronic pulses into the fabric of the score, after which “Time in Solitary,” “Revenge,” and “Michael’s Witness” plunge deeper into tortured electronics, dissonance, and fragmented orchestral ideas, all of which capture the frustration, anger, and despair felt by the boys as they recall their time in juvenile prison and reawaken their need to exact some sort of righteous retribution against their tormentors. There is some searing string writing here, lean and anguished, and I love how parts of “Revenge” echo the electronic rhythms and descending motifs of “The Football Game,” cleverly linking the two events across the decades.

“Learning the Hard Way” is hard-edged, tense, and nervous, with a strong emphasis on dissonance (including siren-like sound effects), and then “Last Night at Wilkinson” – which underscores the utterly horrifying scene in which, the night before they are due to be released, Nokes and the other guards arrange a “farewell party” at which all four boys are brutally raped – is Williams at his darkest and bleakest; the hammered piano lines are relentlessly ruthless.

The emotional turning point of the score arrives in “Father Bobby’s Decision,” which underscores the scene in which Robert De Niro’s character finally learns the truth about what happened at Wilkinson and vows to help the boys achieve some semblance of justice. The complicated emotional impact of the music here is superbly judged by Williams, who wraps the main theme in lyrical strings, warmer horns, elegant flutes, and mysterious-sounding electronic tonalities to capture Father Bobby’s dilemma and the eventual moment of grace. “Reliving the Past” slowly builds the intensity of its electronic pulses and rock percussion over the course of almost four minutes, preparing the ground for the magnificent “Reunion and Finale,” where Williams finally allows the score’s suppressed emotion to break through. The main theme sounds especially poignant and beautiful when carried by Jim Thatcher’s horn playing; there is catharsis and a sense of earned victory here, certainly, but it is underpinned by a little bitterness, acknowledging the boys’ lost childhood innocence.

Sleepers is unquestionably difficult music, especially for those used to the easy thrills of John Williams’s more famous works, but that is precisely why I find it so impressive. Williams deliberately denies the listener the immediate melodic gratification associated with many of his best-known scores, replacing it with electronics, fractured rhythms, religious sonorities, dissonance, and bruised orchestral lyricism. Yet beneath all that darkness is a powerful musical portrayal of innocence remembered, innocence destroyed, and eventual justice regained. The Academy recognized the achievement with a nomination for Best Original Dramatic Score (although he eventually lost to Gabriel Yared and The English Patient), and thirty years later Sleepers remains one of the most unusual and overlooked Williams works of the 1990s.

Buy the Sleepers soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• Sleepers at Wilkinson (3:41)
• Hell’s Kitchen (5:23)
• The Football Game (4:09)
• Saying the Rosary (6:53)
• The Trip to Wilkinson (2:35)
• Time in Solitary (4:23)
• Revenge (2:46)
• Michael’s Witness (4:09)
• Learning the Hard Way (5:21)
• Last Night at Wilkinson (3:51)
• Father Bobby’s Decision (3:56)
• Reliving the Past (3:40)
• Reunion and Finale (5:30)

Running Time: 56 minutes 24 seconds

Philips 454 -988-2 (1996)

Music composed and conducted by John Williams. Orchestrations by John Neufeld. Featured musical soloists Janet Ferguson and Jim Thatcher. Recorded and mixed by Shawn Murphy. Edited by Kenneth Wannberg. Album produced by John Williams.