Woody Allen (1973)

In Sleeper, Woody Allen plays Miles Monroe, who once ran a health food shop in Greenwich Village and went into hospital in 1973 for peptic ulcer surgery that went fatally wrong.  Miles’s body was cryogenically preserved, however, and he’s revived two hundred years later by scientists who are part of an underground movement in the totalitarian state that America has become.   Their plan is for Miles, because he has no biometric identity, to infiltrate the military dictatorship’s planning of something called the ‘Aires Project’ (pronounced ‘Aries’:  I wasn’t sure if the spelling was meant to be one of many examples of the state’s ineptitude).  The plan, of course, misfires:  when the authorities arrest the scientists responsible, Miles takes refuge in a van containing robot butlers (in traditional butler attire) and pretends to be one of them.   He finds himself working for a poetess socialite called Luna Schlosser (Diane Keaton):  when she wants to get the butler’s head changed for a more ‘aesthetically pleasing’ one, Miles has no option but to reveal to Luna his true identity.  She threatens to turn him in to the authorities so Miles gags and kidnaps Luna, and goes on the run.  When she finds herself threatened by the militia even as she’s trying to hand Miles over to them, Luna changes sides; she and Miles become allies and, pretty soon, start falling in love.  In the course of the next hour, they get separated, Miles gets brainwashed, Luna joins a group of guerrilla rebels who de-brainwash him, and the pair penetrate the site of the Aires Project.  This turns out to be a plan to clone the state’s leader from his nose – all that remains of him as the result of a rebel bomb plot several months earlier.  Mistaken for doctors, Miles and Luna are asked to perform the cloning operation.   They steal the nose from the lab and manage to squash it under a steamroller.

I saw Sleeper on its initial release and it’s the first Woody Allen film I remember really enjoying.  I enjoyed it again nearly forty years on but it’s not as good as Love and Death, which came next.   In Love and Death, there’s both a disjunction and a kinship between the Allen character Boris and the world of nineteenth-century Russian literature (although Boris’s mindset is anachronistic, his propensity for melancholy cerebration fits with the setting) – and the combination is exuberantly funny.  Sleeper, which Allen co-wrote with Marshall Brickman, doesn’t have the same quality:   Allen is often preoccupied here with more slapstick, less verbal comedy.  There are plenty of words eventually – although it takes a while for Miles to speak and comes as a considerable relief when he does – but the focus on the visual in Sleeper tends to de-emphasise the incongruity of the forty-year-old man from 1973 and the world of 2173 in which he comes back to life.  There are times in more verbose Woody Allen films when you want him to shut up yet, when he’s mute, you feel starved.  This movie was the first in which he’d directed Diane Keaton (she’d co-starred in Play It Again, Sam but Herbert Ross directed) and, although his off-screen partnership with her had already ended by this time, perhaps Allen needed the experience of Sleeper to realise Keaton’s potential as a comedienne.  She’s very charming here but partly because of her game-for-anything quality:  her character isn’t as coherent, or Keaton’s playing as secure, as in Love and Death two years later.

There are plenty of funny things to watch and to make you realise that Woody Allen is an accomplished physical comedian:  the troupe of humanoid-butlers in their black suits and bow ties and, in Miles’s case, tortoiseshell-framed spectacles; a fight routine in which Miles and one of his pursuers keep slipping on a giant banana skin; Miles semi-airborne in an inflatable suit.   You get a sense, though, that the physical comedy is there because Allen feels this, rather than laugh lines, are the essence of screen comedy.  (Extracts from an interview with Richard Schickel, included in the BFI programme note, seem to confirm this.)  It’s a variation on the clown-wanting-to-play-Hamlet syndrome:  a stand-up wanting to be Chaplin or Buster Keaton or Harold Lloyd.  But the essence of Woody Allen is words and the highlights in Sleeper are word-based, notably the bits when the rebels are taking Miles through traumatic events in his past.  There’s a reconstruction of a Brooklyn family meal with Luna and the macho rebel leader Erno (John Beck) doing amusingly bad Jewish accents (and gestures).  Even better is the A Streetcar Named Desire sequence with Allen as Blanche Dubois and Keaton as Brando as Stanley Kowalski.  And maybe best of all is a sketch in a different part of the film:  Miles’s visit to an automated clothing store:  ‘Ginsberg and Cohen: Computerised Fittings since 2073’.  The proprietors are a couple of robots but their conversation is that of Jewish gents’ outfitters of an earlier century.  There are one-liners in Sleeper that are justly famous:   Miles’s response to the news that his brain is to be ‘electronically simplified’ (“My brain?  That’s my second favourite organ!”); the closing dialogue, when Luna asks him what he believes in and he tells her sex and death (“… two things that come but once in my lifetime, but at least after death you’re not nauseous”).

A futuristic parody setting might seem to offer the guarantee of ready made laughs but Woody Allen is rather careless of the possibilities.  At the same time, Sleeper is more tethered than it need be to its sci-fi adventure plot:  I could have done with a more cavalier disregard for sticking with the storyline – especially when Allen’s heart isn’t really in doing this.  Sleeper stops rather than ends and some promising jokes don’t lead anywhere along the way (for example, when Luna’s party guests arrive, the robot Miles takes their coats and puts them in what he thinks is a wardrobe but turns out to be an incinerator but there’s no follow-through to this in terms of the guests’ reactions).  The film is altogether less nourishing than Love and Death but it was impossible not to be struck watching it by what audibly sustained pleasure Woody Allen’s work is giving to the more or less full houses coming to see his films in this month’s BFI season.   The many white-coated members of the cast include Marya Small, whom I remember as one of the girls McMurphy gets into the asylum in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  The highly enjoyable accompanying music is played by Allen and other members of the Preservation Hall Jazz Band.

18 January 2012