by Fiona Underhill

I’ve been tasked by MJ’s fearless leader to come up with something “spooky” themed for October’s column. But, as I’m not great at being told what to do, I’ve decided on something of a twist to this theme. Brad Pitt is having a huge ‘moment’ in film in 2019, with the double-whammy of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood and Ad Astra, he’s all but guaranteed an Oscar nomination at the 2020 ceremony. So I’ve decided to look back on, what for me, is still the peak of his career – the mid-90s. The whole decade was strong for Pitt – from 1992’s Robert Redford-directed A River Runs Through It (a personal favorite) to ending with his iconic role as Tyler Durden in 1999’s Fight Club. However, he had a 4-film run right in the middle of the decade which is one of the strongest streaks of any actor’s career. From the Southern Gothic of 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, to 1995’s Seven and Twelve Monkeys (for which he received a Supporting Actor nomination) and rounding out with 1996’s Sleepers. It may seem natural for me to focus on Pitt’s gentile vampire Louis for a Halloween-themed article, especially as I do dearly love that film and Pitt’s performance (his rapport with Kirsten Dunst is a particular highlight). However, I’ve decided instead to explore the more grounded and realistic horrors of David Fincher’s Seven and Barry Levinson’s Sleepers. 

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the concept of Seven, as it has endured in popular culture and (that most important of touchstones) memes. Pitt plays a young, idealistic detective who moves with his even younger wife to the big, dystopian city to tackle society’s evils. He is paired with older, cynical, bitter, jaded Morgan Freeman, who – you guessed it – is a week away from retirement. Unfortunately, a serial killer starts a campaign which involves gruesome and grizzly deaths themed around the Seven Deadly Sins. Despite having an insanely big-name cast, including ROBERT DE NIRO and DUSTIN HOFFMAN, no less, Sleepers is a much-less known film, which almost no one talks about these days. Based on a controversial book, which the author claimed was a true story (despite there being no evidence to back this up), Sleepers deals with 4 close friends from 1960’s Hell’s Kitchen who commit a crime and are sent to a boy’s correctional facility. They are subjected to horrific abuse while they are there. Fast-forward to about 13 years later (in the early 80s), two of the boys stumble across the ring-leader of the abusers and they shoot him. There follows a complicated trial which involves Dustin Hoffman’s patsy lawyer and Robert De Niro’s perjured priest.

Seven had a big impact on me as a teenager, to the point where I had recurring nightmares about it before I even saw it. By the time I did get around to watching it, I had built it up in my head to be the scariest thing imaginable and it pretty much met those expectations. From the famous title sequence (set to Nine Inch Nails’ Closer/Precursor with its scratched lettering), through to the horrific murder-aftermath scenes themselves and one of the bleakest endings of all time, Seven is a visceral and unsettling experience. However, re-watching it for the first time in years (for this article), I did notice that there was a lot more humor in it than I remembered. I love that Somerset (Freeman) tells Mills (Pitt) to read Dante, Chaucer, Milton etc as research and he gives up and buys the Cliffs Notes. Seven features my favorite Brad Pitt performance – he is incredible in it. He’s not afraid to be unlikeable, he’s pretty much a huge asshole throughout, but the audience is absolutely right there with him when the astonishing denouement comes. It’s hard to choose which of the murder crime-scenes is the hardest to witness, but I think it has to be Sloth which is the most shocking, by virtue of the fact that the victim isn’t quite dead.

The first half of Sleepers centers around four incredible child actors, especially Joe Perrino (Shakes). Shakes is torn between being a good altar boy and contemplating priesthood (under the guidance of De Niro’s Father Bobby) and getting involved in the lowest rungs of the criminal empire run by local mobster King Benny (Vittorio Gassman). One day, Shakes and his friends are hot and bored, so they steal a hot dog cart from a vendor, who gives chase. In a moment of madness, they hold the cart over the top of the steps to the subway, but they can’t hold the weight and let go, crushing someone below. This is the incident that sends them to the Wilkinson Home for Boys, where guard Sean Nokes (Kevin Bacon) and friends start to terrorize and torture them. As adults, two of the boys – John (Ron Eldard) and Tommy (Billy Crudup) have succumbed to the criminal way of life and when they happen upon Nokes by chance in a bar, they exact their revenge. Shakes (now played by Jason Patric) is a low-level journalist and Michael (Brad Pitt, who is played by Brad Renfro when younger – a genius bit of casting) is a lawyer. Michael takes the prosecution case against his friends, in the hope of throwing the trial and getting them off. He also wants to stealthily put the Wilkinson Home for Boys on trial, by calling one of the guards, Ferguson (Terry Kinney) as a character witness. Dustin Hoffman plays Snyder, John and Tommy’s defense lawyer, who is being fed questions and strategy by Michael. It will come as no surprise that both De Niro and Hoffman give incredible performances. Hoffman is in understated mode, with a quiet, mumbly, unsure-of-himself cadence and De Niro portrays a steadfast, loyal presence in the lives of these boys – where the adult world has largely let them down. Father Bobby is morally complex, he has engaged in petty criminal behaviors himself, his best friends are multiple murderers and then he is faced with the ultimate quandary. Will he lie on the witness stand, after swearing an oath on the Bible, for the greater good?

Seven is justly held up as an enduring classic – the writing (particularly the pacing and structure) by Andrew Kevin Walker is exceptional and Brad Pitt gives the performance of his career. It still has the power to shock today, especially if you go into it without knowing the ending. Perhaps even more depressing than the murders themselves is the atmosphere of malaise and apathy in the rain-drenched city, which is like a classic Noir backdrop. Gwyneth Paltrow (as Tracy Mills) conveys many relatable concerns – the loneliness of moving to a big city, living in a shitty apartment and her fears and doubts about having children. All of this grounding in reality makes the extremity of the elaborate murders much more plausible, especially as the killer himself comes into the film in the last third and starts spouting his manifesto. 

Sleepers seems all but forgotten now. Admittedly it is a long film (although one which is very much divided into two halves), with a tough subject matter and came out two years after the similarly-themed Shawshank Redemption. However, it features excellent child performances, some of De Niro and Hoffman’s best work and turns into a compelling trial-based movie in the second half.  It asks interesting moral questions of its characters and the audience – is vigilante justice ever acceptable? Just as Seven builds towards a climactic act of revenge, Sleepers also pivots on its main characters achieving vengeance (with a dash of inspiration from the Count of Monte Cristo). So, if you’ve come for a spooky-themed column full of ghosts and ghouls, I’m sorry to disappoint. Instead I bring you, for your consideration this October, the real-world horrors of Seven and Sleepers.