Thursday with Robert Redford
“Sneakers” (1992)
Sneakers is an amusing caper comedy. With a good cast, a twist and Robert Redford leading a gang of criminals who make a living preventing crime, it’s enjoyable to a point. Sneakers is also irritating. This is because its wrong, dated politics grates. The 1992 film, released on September 11, months before the first Islamic terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, correctly forecast the surveillance state.
This underscores how wrong the film is about everything else. Opening scenes, which take place in 1969, depict two New Left radicals hacking computers to steal money in the name of social justice. One gets caught and goes to prison. The other, a younger version of the Redford character, escapes police detection. His past catches up with him when the film cuts to present day. His assembly of shady characters includes a conspiracy theorist (Dan Aykroyd), a coltish dullard (River Phoenix), an ex-agent for the Central Intelligence Agency (Sidney Poitier) and a blind technician (David Strathairn). They’re enlisted, like it or not, in a cause to recover a black box purported to contain encrypted infrastructure data captured by Russians.
When National Security Agency (NSA) heavies finger Russia, Redford’s character casts doubt, referring to the end of the Cold War, snapping: “We won, they lost.” The smug retort’s one of many flip assertions reflecting the film’s politics. Back then, leftists dismissed Soviet Russia, then, when its Communist system collapsed, they acted as if they hadn’t blanked out and turned the other cheek on 70 years of mass murder. The Universal Pictures film, directed by Field of Dreams director Phil Alden Robinson, goes blank, too, showcasing how wrong the New Left was then and is now. Sneakers is almost worth seeing as evidentiary of New Left lunacy and bankruptcy.
See Sneakers instead for its cast, the misguided attempt at comedy as only Hollywood can bungle humor and the probably unintended key points Sneakers gets right; that the NSA sought to subvert the Constitution and spy on Americans—and that the honest leftist redounds to authoritarianism, anarchism and statism. For all the cutesy righteousness, with appearances and performances by Ben Kingsley, James Earl Jones and thirtysomething’s Timothy Busfield, Sneakers asks the audience to regard hacking into the nation’s Federal Reserve Bank, power grid and air traffic control as ominous while making light of property theft when victims are Republicans and the beneficiaries of wealth expropriation and redistribution are Black Panthers or the United Negro College Fund (itself a horrible mixing of terrorism with a decent cause).
What later became today’s orthodoxy ages poorly, especially as certain conservatives claim that government leftists use technology to subvert America’s electoral process, which is exactly what Sneakers’ anti-heroes do. There’s good acting, especially by Poitier and Strathairn, and seeing them boogie with a token female is fun. As a vehicle for Robert Redford, the film rallies with his trademark integrity intact. Mired in contradiction, Sneakers tries to have ethics every which way.
“No more rich people, no more poor people, everybody’s the same…isn’t that what we always wanted?” This question goes unanswered in a line which unwittingly reveals Sneakers’ nihilo-egalitarian theme, smuggled in with humor. Never mind that, when its plot became reality, it was New Left crusader Barack Hussein Obama, not the dreaded Republican Party, persecuting and seeking to prosecute the whistleblower against the surveillance state; a 29-year-old who was forced by the United States of America to escape—eventually to Russia (!). Buried within this fantasy is the truth that spying on Americans without proper authority is a government plot. Toward the film’s end, after the NSA has executed innocent people, smug jokes fall flat.
Branford Marsalis plays jazz on the soundtrack, which features music by Jim Croce, Miles Davis, Frederic Chopin, Charlie Byrd, Aretha Franklin, Johannes Sebastian Bach and Bob Dylan and is too slick and overpowering as composed by James Horner. Thirty years after its debut, Sneakers , which ultimately plays like a pilot for a TV series, sneaks a peek at the future in spite of its flat, rotting politics.
Thursday with Robert Redford
I loved that movie!