2173 and All That

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

SLEEPER

Directed by WOODY ALLEN Screenplay by WOODY ALLEN and MARSHALL BRICKMAN

Woody Allen has seen the future --and it doesn't work any better than the present. In Sleeper, having undergone an unsuccessful operation for a peptic ulcer, he is wrapped in tin foil and cryogenically preserved. Two hundred years hence he is heated 'n' served in an America that has managed to preserve only that which is ghastly in our own culture: a political leader who only appears before the public mouthing pious platitudes on TV, Rod McKuen's poetry, Walter Kean's paintings, McDonald's hamburgers and vegetables, which have carried the current trend toward tasteless giganticism to its logical extreme--strawberries as big as medicine balls, bananas taller than a man.

One can imagine what happens when Allen slips on one of those banana peels. It is almost impossible, however, to convey the intricacy of his comic inventiveness, the shrewdness with which he sustains his comic lines. The simplest measure of Sleeper's success is perhaps the fact that one recalls it not by quoting Allen's one-liners but by trying to describe--inadequately--his beautifully built visual gags.

One of his conceits is that anyone who has been asleep for two centuries will probably have to grow up all over again. This gives Allen an opportunity to do a zany turn as a toddler set loose in the operating room where he has been revived. Later, he discovers that all the servants in his cowardly new world are robots (the ones assigned to homosexuals even lisp). To escape from the security police (whose ray gun, incidentally, is always blowing up on them, the spirit of the CIA being immortal), he disguises himself as one of the robots. This bit becomes especially hilarious when his owner (the admirable Diane Keaton) returns him to the factory in order to have a new and more pleasing head installed. Other hairbreadth escapes employ a recalcitrant flying-belt of the sort first used by James Bond, a wildly inflatable rubber suit and a 200-year-old Volkswagen that starts on the first try.

Allen finally links up with the revolutionary underground, but he is no kinder to it than to the Establishment. He accuses its musclebound, Marxist leader of neglecting his duties in order to take handsome lessons. In the end, he manages to win Miss Keaton and overthrow the Government by posing as the doctor engaged to clone a new head of state from the nose of the deceased one, then holding the nose hostage for the revolution.

Allen's subject may be futuristic, but his method of attacking it links him with the grand tradition of silent comedy. Like such masters of that tradition as Chaplin and Keaton, he deplores the notion that things can be improved through scientific and political "progress." Like them, he obviously believes it his unsolemn duty to subvert such nonsense. Sleeper is his definitive assault on it. And his funniest.

.Richard Schickel

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