Stranger In A Strange Can

SMOTHERED in aluminum foil like a baked potato or a TV dinner, it's a changed Woody Allen that the doctors unwrap and usher into the yea 2173 at the beginning of Sleeper. Allen has really written this picture--it's painstakingly mapped out--and most of the jokes, for better or worse, are inherent in the science fiction scenario of a post-holocaust future two hundred years from now. The same is true of the hero's new persona, which flows out of the scripted material like soup from a can, Allen sealed--maybe too tightly--in the perfect container.

The futuristic mode has popped up in Allen's work before, as in the pilot-to-copilot routine in Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex..., where the human body is a compartmentalized bureaucratic machine gone away, and Allen plays a sperm cell. Allen likes the tension between the human and the mechanical--there's a natural humor of incompetence in it. But in Sleeper the technocratic setting takes over, framing--maybe dominating--his talent, underlining the classic Allenesque plight of the weak human with simple (if overwhelming) personal problems against a strong, impersonal society.

Everything is exaggerated in 2173--the government makes Portuguese Angola look like Summerhill, farmers electronically grow bananas as big as canoes, MacDonald's proclaims 750,000,000,000,000,000,etc., served--so Allen's predicament is intensified. He had enough trouble with New York, God knows, and now this. Alone in the future, not knowing why, he's hunted down as "the alien." Audiences, who always identified with Allen's alienation, feel no more at home in a hostile 2173 than he does. This is a change from the earlier Allen: Before there was a hint that the world was over the brink, but in Sleeper it's a blatant fact.

Allen's relative sanity in Sleeper shifts the emphasis from the traditional part he plays. At the heart of Allen's appeal, of course, is the schlep, the cumsy neurotic from Brooklyn who's always victimized but likeable. The endearment generally doesn't trigger pathos, however, as with Chaplin (although Allen's capable of that). he shuns the universal in favor of something more contemporary, more esoteric, keener. The source of pleasure is the basic I-thought-I-was-messed-up-but-look-at-this-guy response--a comforting thought. But you never feel sorry for him. He understands somehow where he would be if life treated him better, and he is never lost, never helpless. He always has a home, somewhere, at the movies in Play It Again, Sam, or his 1973 Greenwich Village health food store in Sleeper.

Sleeper still has Allen deactivating the fuses of an audience's most fiendishly paranoiac fantasies. But there's much more of the awareness that the world's crazy, not him. His savvy comes from the city rat's instinct for survival. He knows that the witty things he says are idiotic and absurd, but he also knows that they are a defense mechanism. In 2173 he can roll sophisticated eyes at the lifestyle of the futuristic zombies that surround him, no matter how much they intimidate him. He's more cynical than they are, which becomes a heroic trait, a kind of defiance. Allen is fighting back in this picture, and it works--the audience follows right along.

ALLEN doesn't know how to be a winner, of course. He's still crazy, except that in the world of the future he has a right to be. There is dignity in his insanity. Take the machines, for instance, an old Allen theme built into the setting of this movie. Mechanical objects always hated Woody Allen; it was as if they had a conspiracy against him. In 2173 the health food refugee is in a world full of machines--robot domestic servants, the "Orb" for getting high, a contraption called the Orgasmatron which looks like a hot water heater and supplies instant climax when you climb in ("I'm strictly a hand operation," Allen protests). The machines give Allen a lot of trouble, as usual, but in the end he makes the computers look ridiculous.

And so it is with the straights who surround him. Allen is always lost in a sea of normal people, and, like the best comic actors, makes them appear ridiculous by his very presence. He doesn't even have to try to do this here, because the absurd futuristic lifestyle doesn the work for him. Even the handsome musclebound machos are no threat. They seem doubly stupid, because Allen by definition is the only bright person in the movie.

Allen's making things easy for himself. In Sleeper, it's the futuroids who have beliefs; Allen is the nihilist, spurning art, science, religion, political solutions. Much of the satire in the film arises out of this, and Allen probably really means it when he says he believes only in sex and death. This undercuts some of his punch. The future sets up America's excesses, and Allen knocks them down with simple irreverence, a refusal to take them seriously. There's no room for the subtle snipe when the targets are set up like sitting ducks.

PERHAPS the environment in Sleeper is altogether too comfortable for Allen. There are jokes that he doesn't have to strive for. Often the best lines come from the old Allen, unbound by the plot, as when, identifying relics of the 1970s for the doctors, he explains the Playboy pin-up models never existed, but were inflated like balloons.

There could be fewer scenes without dialogue, those bits of staged visual mayhem with a sound-track of Preservation Hall-style jazz: It begins to look like the Keystone Cops, whereas Allen is best when he opens his mouth.

But Woody Allen is out finest screen comedian. He only goes seriously wrong when there's not enough of him, like his not directing Play It Again, Sam, or his absence from some of the skits in Everything... But in Sleeper he's everywhere, directing, staring (Diane Keaton is there, too, but she can't fit into what is designed to be a one-man show) and co-authoring (with Marshal Brickman), generally leaving his stamp all over this terrifically funny film. Woody Alley may be staging everything a little too perfectly here, but he isn't going to lose us.