SLEEPER
A film review by Andrew Hicks
Copyright 1996 Andrew Hicks / Fatboy Productions
(1973) ***1/2 (out of four)
It was easy for me to forget after watching films like Crimes and Misdemeanors and Mighty Aphrodite that Woody Allen began his career making light-hearted slapstick comedies. SLEEPER, the incredibly funny follow-up to BANANAS, continues the antics by taking a premise and going seemlessly from location to location, uniting all sorts of sitcom-like situations. One minute Woody is using a giant inflatable suit to escape from his enemies and the next he and Diane Keaton are posing as doctors who must perform an operation they know nothing about, a set-up that's been used countless times since, most notably in SPIES LIKE US and HOUSEGUEST. (I'm not implying there was anything notable about the movie HOUSEGUEST.)
The premise that provides all this has Miles Monroe (Allen), owner of the Happy Carrot Health Food Store, being thawed out in the year 2173, two hundred years after he went into the hospital for a "routine operation." The country has since become a police state and the doctors who revive him ask all sorts of questions about the long-since forgotten era of history he came from.
For instance, a video clip of Howard Cosell yammering in monotone about some sport -- a torture device used on the most brutal prisoners? "That's exactly what that was," Allen replies. Woody also finds comedy in the doctors' passing revelations that the health food he and other people so faithfully devoted themselves to was actually destructive to the body. One doctor offers nervous Woody a cigarette to calm him down. "Tobacco is one of the healthiest substances for the body."
We soon find out the real reason he was thawed out -- to help lead the underground resistance. As the only person alive without massive amounts of government data compiled about him, he could be invaluable to them. All this comes into play toward the end, in a hilarious climax involving the leader's nose, but for most of the movie, he's Dr. Woody Kimball, fugitive from the law, running and hiding in multiple comedic scenes, many of which offer extended silent sequences hearkening back to the silent Chaplin and Keaton films.
And why not? Woody's done his take on almost every other era of movie making, from the romances of the 30's (Purple Rose of Cairo) to the documentaries of the World War II era (ZELIG) and even ancient forms of entertainment like radio (RADIO DAYS) and Greek tragedy (MIGHTY APHRODITE). His talent for mixing silent slapstick with his hilarious-as-usual one-liners (after he is given a pet robot dog as a gift, he asks, "Is this dog housebroken or is he going to be leaving little batteries on the floor?") makes SLEEPER just one of the many classic films Woody Allen has brought us.
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