SLEEPER (1973) *** I'm not sure if Woody Allen is being Charlie Chaplin, all three of the Three Stooges, Abbott & Costello, Al Jolson and James Bond all at the same time, or if he's indulging multiple personality disorder in accordance with a roulette wheel of a script, but it's very funny. The plot's Woody's indictment of the decade (and coming centuries), before most of the fact, and terribly on point; but prophecy always plays no better than second in his docket of virtues, and here its primary purpose is to get from one great one-liner to the next. Reagan, Nixon, Howard Cosell, not even Tennessee Williams is spared in the verbal carnage. It's all very insightful, politically, and most of all so when Rip Van Woody declares his lack of belief in political, scientific, or religious solutions. There's not much room for anyone else in the movie, but Diane Keaton does a mean Brando imitation for a deluded poet. There's a term paper to be written on Woody's projection of every olden-tyme sight gag into the future to the accompaniment of jazz; contrasted against creeping fascism, artists wearing swastikas to dinner parties, and the marginalization of anyone who both understands and cares. I'd postulate jazz as Woody's constant virtue, the history of slapstick as the only essential political frame of reference, and the creativity of the masses in rationalizing the necessity of armed conflict and totalitarianism as compelling evidence that some day very soon the world will be ruled by a cabal exhibiting the dignity and philosophical decorum of the Stooges. Then look at any G8 group photo and realize that Woody's prophecy has already come to pass.
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