In Allen’s first collaboration with screenwriter Marshall Brickman (Annie Hall), he’s at the top of his game as the neurotic and self-deprecating Miles Monroe, a clarinet player and health food store owner, who is cryogenically frozen and awakened 200 years later in an Orwellian future. While revisiting some of the social commentary he touched on in Bananas, Miles is recruited by the scientific rebels who revive him, to help to stop the “Aries Project” – a fitting name that could be used to describe 1970’s sci-fi filmmaking. Diane Keaton is wonderful as Luna Schlosser, the beautiful and free-spirited artist who is initially kidnapped by Miles, but eventually succumbs to his clumsy charms. Sleeper successfully combines Woody Allen’s intellectual and underdog neurosis, with the slapstick humor from the Max Sennett comedies of the silent film era. Sleeper is also an ambitious science fiction undertaking, that just might elicit the most laugh out loud moments in the canon of Woody Allen films.
Kim Morgan discusses Sleeper on the New Beverly blog.
