SLEEPER

(December 1973, U.S.)

By 1973, science fiction had taken a very grim turn. Films like PLANET OF THE APES, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (both 1968), A CLOCKWORK ORANGE and THX-1138 (both 1971) depicted visions of the future that were either dystopian or reflective of our dependence on artificial intelligence. Leave it to Woody Allen to turn that into the screwball comedy SLEEPER. Still, Woody being Woody, he's also paying great tribute to the comedy legends he's long admired, like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Groucho Marx and Bob Hope.

As Miles Monroe, Woody plays a neurotic jazz musician and health food restaurant owner who is cryongenically frozen without his knowledge or consent in the year 1973 after a seemingly routine operation and is awakened two hundred years later in a United States led under a police authoritarian state and dictatorship. In any such state, there's, of course, the rebellion to stand up and fight against the oppression of the people. Still, how desperate do you have to use someone like Woody Allen as a spy to infiltrate the mysterious "Aries Project", rumored to be downfall of humanity. This is where comedy and lunacy takes over because Woody never fails to deliver the human characteristics of his personality that have always made him a hoot to laugh at. And don't forget, this is still during the period of his "early funny movies" (as many fans have come to refer to them) before ANNIE HALL. As Miles reluctantly tries to avoid his destiny and escape the authorities, he disguises himself as a robot butler and goes to work for Luna (played by Woody's best co-star ever, Diane Keaton), a futuristic socialite without much of a brain, but with many of the futuristic gadgets that make living in the 22nd Century a whole lot of fun, including the Orb (a spherical substitute for marijuana) and the ever-popular Orgasmatron (a chamber-like substitute for traditional sex and human contact. Hmmm...wonder if that would come in handy today??). Rather that be turned into the police by Luna, he kidnaps her and the two of them are on the run. If you've seen enough of how Woody and Diane were together on film, then you know their time together is filled with not only the great comic chemistry they share, but also the impatience and annoyance they also shared for each other's quirkiness and idiosyncrasies. Even when they're not saying anything, there's just something about the way they respond to each other physically when they occupy the same shot...

When they're finally on the same side and out to bring down the totalitarian government, it's pure insanity as they seek to destroy the one thing that can continue to enslave mankind - the national leader's nose, the only thing left of him after dying in an explosion set by the rebels. Without the nose, the leader cannot be cloned. Posing as doctors, Woody and Diane are priceless as they almost seem to ad-lib every word that comes out of their mouths as they pretend to know what they're doing at the operating table in front of watchful eyes. This is one of the best sequences Woody ever wrote in his early movie years. I still crack up when repeatedly utters, "Checking the cell structure!" (by the way, if you listen carefully to the voice of the medical computer in this scene, you may recognize the voice of Douglas Rain, the man who provided the voice for the HAL-9000 in 2001). And like any situation that Woody and Diane are in, they fall in love. But even that glimmer of hope in an otherwise unpleasant future has it's down side, because as Miles so bluntly puts it at the end, "Sex and death—two things that come once in a lifetime—but at least after death you're not nauseous."

Despite what Woody Allen's films have become over the last twenty years, it's still a pleasure to remind myself once in a while that he was practically the king of slapstick in the 1970s. With SLEEPER, we're also reminded of a time when sci-fi filmmaking was still unsure of where it was headed, or whether there was any fun left in it. There was, and it's name was STAR WARS, but not for another four years.

Favorite line or dialogue:

Historian (showing Miles a video of Howard Cosell): "We weren't sure at first what to make of this, but we developed a theory. We feel that when people committed great crimes against the state, they were forced to watch this."
Miles Monroe: "Yes. That's exactly what it was."