Tonight’s Triple Feature is a director spotlight on Barry Levinson, a filmmaker whose career is as quietly influential as it is stylistically fluid. We’re looking at three of his most potent and thematically rich films: Good Morning, Vietnam (1987), Sleepers (1996), and Wag the Dog (1997). While these movies differ wildly in tone—ranging from manic comedy to grim drama to razor-sharp political satire—they’re united by something deeper: a fascination with storytelling as both a tool of survival and a weapon of manipulation.
To understand how these films fit together—and what they say about Levinson himself—we need to start with the man behind the camera.
Who Is Barry Levinson?
Barry Levinson emerged from the 1980s auteur boom with a distinctly humanistic voice. A Baltimore native, Levinson first made his mark as a screenwriter, penning ...And Justice for All (1979) and Diner (1982), the latter of which marked his directorial debut. He quickly carved out a niche making intelligent, character-driven dramas with sharp dialogue and a blend of humor and melancholy.
You might call him an American moralist—but a flexible one. His best films don’t preach; they interrogate. Levinson doesn’t arrive at the story with a hammer and message—he arrives with a question. What is the cost of truth? What happens when institutions fail? What stories do we tell to protect ourselves… or to control others?
This puts him in a rare category: a commercial filmmaker who consistently tackles uncomfortable ideas, often smuggled into crowd-pleasing packages.
The Aesthetic: Naturalism Meets Narrative Control
Visually, Levinson isn’t flashy. He doesn’t announce himself with whip-pans or long takes. Instead, his aesthetic is clean, restrained, and deceptively simple—he clears space for character and performance. He’s a director who understands the power of a well-cast actor and a lived-in setting.
But beneath the grounded surface, Levinson is obsessed with the structure and function of narrative. His films constantly interrogate who gets to tell the story, why they're telling it, and what the consequences are. That meta-awareness—about media, perception, and memory—is central to tonight’s triple feature.
Good Morning, Vietnam (1987): Humor as Subversion
Good Morning, Vietnam is perhaps Levinson’s most accessible film, largely thanks to Robin Williams’ explosive, genre-defying performance as real-life military radio DJ Adrian Cronauer. On the surface, it’s a war comedy—a zany, rapid-fire laugh-fest set against the backdrop of Vietnam. But dig deeper, and it’s a biting exploration of truth, censorship, and the psychological cost of telling jokes in a world on fire.
Levinson lets Williams run wild, yes—but he also carefully frames Cronauer as a man whose humor is both a coping mechanism and a form of protest. The military brass wants control over the narrative. Cronauer wants to tell the truth, or at least laugh at the lie. And that tension—between comedy and tragedy, propaganda and rebellion—makes the film more than just a showcase for improv. It becomes a study of how humor can be a form of defiance in the face of institutional rot.
This is Levinson at his most charming, but also his most subversive. He knows a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down—and he laces the sugar with acid.
Sleepers (1996): Trauma, Brotherhood, and Justice Outside the System
Nearly a decade later, Levinson delivered Sleepers, a completely different animal. Based on Lorenzo Carcaterra’s controversial novel (whose “based on a true story” claim remains disputed), Sleepers is a dark, operatic tale of childhood abuse and adult revenge. The humor of Vietnam is gone. In its place: Catholic guilt, corrupted institutions, and the brutal costs of unresolved trauma.
If Good Morning, Vietnam was about resisting propaganda, Sleepers is about rewriting it. The second half of the film becomes an elaborate lie—a staged trial, manufactured witnesses, rigged outcomes—all orchestrated not to deceive the audience, but to achieve justice the legal system refuses to provide.
Levinson doesn’t ask us to condone this. He asks us to understand it. What happens when the people we trust—priests, guards, judges—become the abusers? And what happens when no one will hold them accountable?
This is Levinson’s angriest film, and his most emotionally direct. It’s also deeply personal. Set in Hell’s Kitchen in the 1960s, it’s saturated with nostalgia—until that nostalgia curdles. It’s the American coming-of-age story turned into a horror film.
And once again, we’re dealing with a narrator—Jason Patric’s character—telling us the story long after the fact. But can we trust him? Should we?
Levinson doesn't answer. He just holds the camera steady.
Wag the Dog (1997): Manufacturing Reality in Real Time
If Sleepers is a courtroom drama told through shadows and memory, Wag the Dog is a satire of the same mechanisms—but weaponized in real time. Released just weeks before the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke, this film is practically prophetic.
A spin doctor (Robert De Niro) and a Hollywood producer (Dustin Hoffman) fabricate a fake war to distract from a presidential sex scandal. It’s absurd. It’s hilarious. And it feels… inevitable.
This is Levinson in full meta mode, stripping the illusion of politics down to its skeleton. But while the premise is cynical, the filmmaking is precise and controlled. The performances are pitch-perfect. The script, by David Mamet and Hilary Henkin, is lean and lethal. And the message is terrifying:
If the story is good enough, the facts don’t matter.
Wag the Dog completes the arc that began with Vietnam. In that film, the media truth-teller is punished. In Wag the Dog, the media manipulator is rewarded. Humor, once a weapon of rebellion, has become a tool of control. The satirical bite here is so sharp it draws blood.
What These Films Say About Levinson
Taken together, these three films show a director fascinated by the moral weight of storytelling. Levinson keeps returning to the same idea: that narrative is power. Whether it's used to comfort soldiers, avenge childhood trauma, or distract a nation, stories shape the way we see the world—and they’re always being weaponized by someone.
He’s not flashy. He’s not dogmatic. But Barry Levinson understands something fundamental: that the line between truth and fiction is thin, fragile, and often chosen for us by people we’ll never meet.
And that’s what makes him one of the most essential—and underrated—American filmmakers of the last 40 years.
Disclaimer: The following may contain offensive language, adult humor, and/or content that some viewers may find offensive – The views and opinions expressed by any one speaker does not explicitly or necessarily reflect or represent those of Mark Radulich or W2M Network.
Mark Radulich and his wacky podcast on all the things:
https://linktr.ee/markkind76
also
https://www.teepublic.com/user/radulich-in-broadcasting-network
FB Messenger: Mark Radulich LCSW
Tiktok: @markradulich
twitter: @MarkRadulich
Instagram: markkind76
RIBN Album Playlist: https://suno.com/playlist/91d704c9-d1ea-45a0-9ffe-5069497bad59
