There are two categories of people in this world: those who love Sneakers, and those who have not yet
seen Sneakers. Somewhere there’s a bearded
curmudgeon out there who hates the spy-thriller — and also puppies, free cable
TV and world peace — but who wants to know their opinion anyway.
Sneakers came out this
month in 1992, and even two decades after its release the film has been largely
forgotten. Even the weekend super-marathons on TBS, which did wonders for The Shawshank Redemption, have not
brought the movie out of the depths of dusty obscurity. “Movies wouldn’t be
obscure without devoted fans,” you say. Yes, but Sneakers has fans and many of them are flailing about in the ether
of deep-dark space, where they presume to be the only moviegoer in the whole
sad universe who appreciated a witty, intelligent and well-made espionage movie.
But, alas, the Sneakers
fans are slowly uniting, especially now on the film’s 20th birthday. It also
helps that Slate.com has lit a spy-version of the Beacons of Minas Tirith,
prompting Sneakers fans to jump out
of their loafers (you thought I’d say sneakers!) while yelling “The beacon is
lit, the beacon is lit” as Howard Shore music swells in the background. By the
way, Slate’s Sneakers material is
quite wonderful, please check it out starting here.
I saw Sneakers at a
Goodyear theater in 1992. My parents had taken me and my brother; we were too
young to appreciate all the jokes. Many years later — the theater is now a Christian
center — my brother and I would often revisit Sneakers, which we watched frequently on Netflix’s instant streaming
service. We always knew the film was good, but we never appreciated how good.
Twenty years out, it’s a
masterpiece.
The movie was directed by Field
of Dreams director Phil Alden Robinson, who also wrote the film with
Lawrence Lasker and Steven Spielberg collaborator Walter F. Parkes. The plot
wasn’t so much about spies and espionage, though those themes were the film’s
undercurrent. It was more about technology, old and new. The old was
represented by its characters, a motley crew of rejected ex-spies who now
worked as “security consultants,” which the film implies is corporate gruntwork
for aged hacks. In the first scene they rob a bank just to report to the bank’s
board of directors how their security failed them.
The new technology is symbolized by the electronic gizmo they’re
asked to recover. It has the ability to un-encrypt encrypted servers on a
then-adolescent internet. The device, called Janek’s box after the guy who
built it and who only appears in the movie for about 10 minutes, serves as the
driving force for much of Sneakers’
tech-heavy story. I’d call the box a MacGuffin, Hitchcock’s word for an
immaterial object that everyone wants, but MacGuffins usually serve no purpose,
whereas the box and what it does provide one of the film’s most memorable
scenes.
Sneakers is perfectly cast: a scruffy Robert Redford plays the
founder of the security consultation firm, Sidney Poitier plays his reliable
but short-fused partner, Dan Aykroyd is a geeky tech-nerd named Mother with a
deep fascination for conspiracy theories, David Straithairn is a blind
electronics expert named Whistler, and River Phoenix, the only young guy in the
whole movie, does all the heavy lifting when the old timers are left creaking
and wheezing.
The movie drifts often toward Redford ,
the star, but it gives each character their own presence. Mother’s distrust of
government is woven into many of the jokes, including one gag about Eisenhower
trading cow lips for technology secrets from space aliens. Whistler, who reads Playboy in Braille and uses a special
automated Braille keyboard, solves many of the film’s riddles using only his
ears. In one sequence he programs road noise into a keyboard to simulate the
sounds of riding in the trunk of a car. Even Phoenix , one year before his death, was given
great lines, including one where he can have his choice of anything on the
planet and all he wants is the phone number of the federal agent pointing a gun
at him.
With these actors — and many others, including Ben Kingsley, Mary
McDonnell, Timothy Busfield and the great Stephen Tobolowsky — Sneakers creates a stellar
heist-thriller using its brains before its muscles. And though guns appear in
the movie, they never serve as the driving force of the action. There are no
gunfights or explosions. The action is more subdued and grounded, and always
backseat to brains and science.
While I love the cast dearly and think it’s one of the greatest
ensembles of any movie from any decade, I think I most admire the film’s
versions of science and technology, and also the way the movie uses these ideas
to beat the ever-expanding enigma contained in Janek’s box. Consider a small
scene later in the movie: Redford and his team
need to find out whose office is next door to the one they’re trying to break
into. Another film would have skipped this scene altogether, but Sneakers takes the long way around by
showing us surveillance footage from three days. They wait for the lights to go
out in the office and then they watch who comes out of the building. Day 1
produces a set of people, so does Day 2. By Day 3 they’ve accurately
established they’re target. By analyzing the data, they solve the riddle. Most
movies skip data altogether, or inject it directly into characters’ brains
without requiring them to retrieve it in any plausible way.
In another scene, Redford must
walk through a room so slow that he fools the motion sensors into thinking he’s
just another piece of furniture. He also raises the temperature to the high 90s
to trick the body-heat sensors. Other movies have marathon car chases, but this
one has a man walking … very … very … very … slowly.
My favorite scene, though, one that I feel is perfect in every
way, is in the first act, during a party to celebrate the theft of Janek’s box.
The techheads are over at a computer fumbling around Janek’s work while Redford , Poitier and McDonnell are having some wine,
chatting and playing Scrabble. James Horner’s clarinet- and piano-heavy score
queues up as the film shuffles between the two scenes: Whistler and Mother
hacking into Janek’s box to discover they could manipulate any computer system
in the world, and then back to the board game, which the Redford character
dumps over when he realizes that Setec Astronomy, the company that wants the
box, can be rearranged to write “too many secrets.” The scene ends when the
plug is literally pulled on Janek’s doomsday box.
The only gripe — more of an annoying quirk than anything — is
geared more toward a character and not the movie itself. Late in the film, the
McDonnell character is set up on a blind date with Dr. Werner Brandes, the science
guy whose office was watched on surveillance footage. Brandes enters his office
using a voice-recognition password that he must read aloud: “Hi, my name is
Werner Brandes. My voice is my password. Verify me.” The point of the dinner
date is to record Brandes saying each of these words, which can then later be
spliced together to get into his high-security office.
McDonnell is a sport and before long she has Brandes on tape
saying every word except “passport.” Anyone watching the movie can think of a
better way to get Brandes to say this word; for instance, ask him if he’s been
to Paris, because you haven’t because your … that thing, the paper thing that
gets you into other countries … it expired. Brandes: “Oh, your passport.”
McDonnell, for mystifying reasons, decides a different approach, to fetishize
the word: “I’ve always loved this word. Would you say it for me? I think your
voice would sound terrific saying it. Passport.” The movie makes a point to say
her character isn’t a professional spy, but wow that is dense and desperate.
By the end of the film — after the blind guy drives a van, Ben
Kingsley’s left with the dinner check and James Earl Jones makes an interesting
cameo — Sneakers hasn’t reshaped
movie history. Its cast is great, but none won Oscars. The camera work is
impressive, but nothing is worthy of framing on your wall. The score works
terrific within the movie, but I’d have trouble humming more than half a dozen
notes with the TV off. The story, while solidly intriguing and tightly wound, is
well-written but it’s not Dickens or Hemingway. Why then does Sneakers work so well?
My answer: Because it respects its audience. It assumes everyone
watching it is intelligent enough to appreciate its unique solutions to
time-worn heist puzzles. And with its lack of bared-teeth, bullet-flying
action, Sneakers also assumes
(correctly) that its audience can appreciate brains over trigger fingers.
So to you, Sneakers, a
very happy birthday. And to Sneakers
fans: “The beacon is lit, the beacon is lit.”
