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Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, John Beck, Mary Gregory, Don Keefer ... see more see more... , Brian Avery , Howard Cosell , Chris Forbes , Peter Hobbs , John McLiam , Spencer Mulligan , Lou Picetti , Douglas Rain , Bartlett Robinson , Stanley Ralph Ross , Whitney Rydbeck , Marya Small , Jessica Rains , Mark Gordon , Susan Miller , Howard Cossell

In 1973, health-food store owner Miles Monroe (Woody Allen) enters the hospital for a routine gall bladder operation. When he expires on the operating table, Miles' sister requests permission to cryog... read more read more...enically freeze her brother's body. After 200 years, Miles is unwrapped by a group of scientists and awakens to a "brave new world" of deadening conformity, ruled with an iron fist by a never-seen leader. Miles is forced to flee for his life when the scientists -- actually a group of revolutionary activists -- are overpowered by the leader's police. He eludes the cops by pretending to be an android, and in this guise is sent to work at the home of Luna (Diane Keaton), a composer of greeting cards who thinks that the world of the future is perfect as it stands. There's more, but why spoil your fun? Sleeper is the most visual of Woody Allen's earlier films, and demonstrated a more pronounced rapport between Allen and his off- and onscreen leading lady Diane Keaton than had previously existed. The Dixieland score is performed by the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

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PG, 1 hr. 28 min.

Directed by: Woody Allen

Release Date: December 17, 1973

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DVD Release Date: July 5, 2000

Stats: 1,322 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (1,322)

  • spielberg00
    January 14, 2012
    spielberg00
    It is interesting the way Woody Allen pictures the future. Elevators have been changed into brief love making machines, despite the lack of simple love. Even sadder (but funnier), the dog, Rags, is merely a furry robot; when asked a question, he responds flatly, "Hello. My name i... read mores Rags. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof. Woof." If there is anyone other than Allen who would have the mind to imply, in such a funny fashion, that the modern age is superior to the future, I'd like to know.

    The Allen-Keaton screen pair certainly was not as honest or well-performed as it was in ANNIE HALL, four years later, but it made for a decent format for entertainment. Even better, the two made this the only Allen film I have seen yet to have a strong ending, or at least one that does not leave a question mark lingering above you.
  • cosmo313
    June 9, 2011
    cosmo313
    This early 70s Woody Allen offering blends together a heavy dose of slapstick, silent movies, neuroses, Jewishness, and sci-fi with the result being one of the most silly, absurd, and funniest satirical films I've watched in a while.

    This is the story of a man who, after a rout... read moreine medical procedure gone wrong, finds himself waking up 200 years into the future into a bizarre dystopia where men are impotent, women are frigid, and all is far from being right with the world.

    Like I said, this is some really absurd and silly stuff, so that may not be everyone's cup of tea, but I found a lot of this to be quite hilarious at best, and super witty/chuckle enducing at worst. The set design and production values have a wonderful cheesiness and endearing quality to them, the music is just dynamite (Woody rocks his clarinet on a lot of it), and the performances, oh the performances, those are just tremendously awesome and fun to watch.

    I'm not a big fan of slapstick, but visual gags, silly faces, and performances where body language dominates (ie Belushi in Animal House) work for me, so I found a lot to enjoy here. I did like the slapstick though, because it didn't seem too overbearing, and wasn't the only method of generating laughs.

    This is pretty much the Woody show, but Keaton puts in a hilarious performances as well. One scene in particular, where some of the future people try to help Allen's character remember his past had me doubled over in stitches and nearly crying. There's also lots of great Easter eggs and references to other great sci works such as 2001.

    Give this one a shot. It's ridiculous, a little dated, and incredibly silly, but it's pretty damn hard not to like, or at least get a little something out of.
  • garyX
    January 21, 2011
    garyX
    A health food store owner wakes up from cryogenic stasis to find himself 200 years in the future and the unlikely hero of an underground set on toppling the Big Brother style government. One of Woody Allen's funniest films, Sleeper is scattershot spoof of science fiction movies p... read moreacked with his trademark one liners and clear homages to the silent era. For me, it's easily at its best when parodying the health food fads of the time "All of your friends have been dead for nearly 200 years!" "They can't be, they ate organic rice!" but there's also plenty of slapstick in the style of Chaplin, Lloyd and Keaton as well as some clear nods to the Marx brothers. It's a great mix of po-faced 70s sci-fi (you wouldn't know it was a comedy until Allen's goofy face first appears) and plain sillines and although it's a little hit and miss, when it's funny, it's VERY funny. I could've lived without the ragtime soundtrack (one of my most hated styles of music) but as a whole, it's huge fun.
  • mumby1988
    June 6, 2010
    mumby1988
    Where many serious dramatic or horror directors can hit the ground running first time out, comedy directors usually need a few films to find out what works and how well. John Landis is now widely revered as a comedy director but bits of Kentucky Fried Movie and Animal House feel ... read moreamateurish and slapdash. The same goes for Kevin Smith, although the foul-mouthed adolescence of Clerks is infinitely preferable to the mawkish sentimentality of Jersey Girl.

    Sleeper falls into the same grouping. It's a decent, workable effort from Woody Allen which retains some of its charm and much of its humour. It isn't in the same league as Annie Hall, Manhattan or Hannah and her Sisters, and elements of it have become more irritating than funny over time. But it's an interesting venture from a young filmmaker who hadn't quite figured out what shape his career was going to take.

    Much like its predecessor, Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), Sleeper has its roots in the episodic, observational vignettes of Allen's early writing and stand-up. It has a more narrative structure than 'Sex, and its characters are somewhat more developed, but it remains a hotchpotch of many different ideas and literary sources. Like a stand-up routine, these individual ideas or elements are not there to be explored in any kind of depth; they are only included for as long as they are funny, an observation which will prove useful in helping us to assess the film.

    Sleeper draws on a wide range of dystopian science fiction, both from page and screen. The central premise of a man waking up after two hundred years is loosely based on H. G. Wells' The Sleeper Wakes, but instead of our protagonist waking up as the richest man in the world (due to compound interest), he is merely confused and out of place. In that respect the film owes an equal debt to the Mark Twain story A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, only with the direction of time travel reversed. There are also thematic references to Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, the latter especially in the prominent position of drugs and casual sex. And visually the film reflects the sci-fi ventures of Stanley Kubrick, combining the stark white interiors of 2001 with the peculiar fashions of A Clockwork Orange.

    In a serious-minded sci-fi film this would be all well and good, but Allen marries it instead to the melodramatic slapstick of Buster Keaton and the tart one-liners of the Marx Brothers. The film is on one level Allen paying homage to his comedy heroes; he gives us the most elaborate and funniest banana skin joke in any film, and performs his own version of the mirror trick from Duck Soup. Both of these scenes are funny in their own small way, but they also hint at the central problem with the film as a whole.

    There can be no doubt from watching Sleeper than Allen is an intelligent filmmaker. Most of what made his observational stand-up so enjoyable remains both in the caustic one-liners of Miles Monroe and the fleeting jibes he makes at revered social institutions like the Catholic Church. In one early scene, he is shown a series of photographs and television clips and asked to identify key historical figures. Allen is in his element here, tearing into reputations which took generations to build up with a series of perfectly balanced put-downs, which walk the tightrope between clever and stupid and make it safely to the other side.

    Sleeper is a high concept film in nature, since it has one central idea which the rest of the script has to bend over backwards to support. Just as Jaws wouldn't work if you weren't constantly scared, so Sleeper would quickly fall apart if you ever stopped laughing and started to pick this brave new world apart. Generally this doesn't happen, since Allen's verbal comedy nearly always hits the mark, but the film does feel like he has chucked everything and the kitchen sink at the screen to stop you questioning the logic of the world he has created.

    The biggest problem with Sleeper is that so many different forms of comedy are being employed, and in such a slapdash, desperate manner, that a lot of the substance and intellect gets buried underneath passing entertainment. In Annie Hall, the long speeches about anti-Semitism or the encounter with Marshal McLuhan are not rushed along in a desperate bid to get to the next joke; Allen, as both a writer and director, takes his time, letting a scene unfold and the comedy to develop at the required pace.

    In Sleeper, on the other hand, all of the brilliant gags about religion, revolution and relationships are swept along and quickly forgotten. It's like running around a sweet shop in a desperate bid to sample everything; it's fun, and you have some idea of how it's going to end, but you never get the chance to stop and appreciate each individual moment of craft.

    An equally apt comparison, considering the references to Kubrick, would be with Dr. Strangelove, another film which took a deeply serious prospect and succeeded in making it seem ridiculous (Sleeper does actually reference Strangelove -- notice that 'the leader' is in a wheelchair and has a similar haircut). Dr. Strangelove works so well, on one level, because it identifies exactly what kind of comedy it wants to be very early on: the script is rooted in absurdist humour and supported by Kubrick's focus on the Freudian undertones of power. Sleeper doesn't have that level of consistency, and in its weaker moments towards the end it does feel like it is clutching at straws.

    On top of the general feeling of fleetingness and inconsistency, parts of Sleeper are just really, really annoying. The slapstick scenes are scored with Allen playing clarinet with his ragtime band. On paper this sound fine, since silent comedy has always been backed by music and the clarinet was used in 'Dance of the Cuckoos', the famous Laurel and Hardy theme. But in the film itself it's really grating, being mixed far too loud and undermining some of the best visual jokes in the process. Plus, if you can get beyond the neuroticism of Allen's character (i.e. you realise that he's not just playing himself), you still have to deal with Diane Keaton; for a lot of the film her character is greatly unlikeable, and no matter how much irony there is on screen we struggle to care about her for some time.

    Sleeper is a comedy which is equal parts grating and grin-inducing. So much of what Allen does here is annoying, or repetitive, or too much of a diversion from the central concept. But the film never really stops being funny, and thus it continues to work as a comedy. Whether it's the running joke about the exploding guns or the well-crafted put-downs, you'll find a certain aspect of Sleeper that will tickle your funny bone. It isn't as well-crafted as Dr. Strangelove, nor do its jokes carry the story as well as in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. But it still works well both as a slice of clownish escapism and as a reminder of the greatness which has long since diminished.
  • bottcorecords1
    May 11, 2010
    bottcorecords1
    1973's "Sleeper" comes at the latter end of Woody Allen's run of slapstick films and is possibly his most polished film up to that point. Miles Monroe, Allen's typical neurotic New Yorker character dies on the operating table while having a routine cyst removed, is cryogenically... read more frozen and awakened 200 years in the future. He then spends the rest of the film on the run from the "big brother" government and a "soma"-fed society. It does feel, most of the time, like a ridiculous send up of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", only with more 70s pop references. It's time capsule comedy, the type most of today's younger viewers aren't going to find funny, but I still think it has plenty of laughs.
  • MissMorganLeee
    April 19, 2010
    MissMorganLeee
    This is possibly the funniest movie I've ever seen! Woody Allen is a RIOT! This is the first movie of his that Ive ever seen and I loved it! The music and the humor is great! He is sooo funny!!!!!
  • fb619846742
    October 19, 2009
    fb619846742
    One of my favorite Woody Allen movies. Very funny, extremely unique, and of course, there's a love story.
  • moonrivers
    April 30, 2009
    moonrivers
    a young man's loving homage to his loves, like chaplin, keaton, lloyd, et al, and why not, and diane keaton (in perhaps the film that made her) his infectiously charming paramour at the time, and the old time new orleanian jazz music (or is it klezmer) (which, again, the man love... read mores, hell, he plays it), which makes for one big charismatic matzo ball from the '70's, vey is mir! the last allen film perhaps before he became the writer/director mangod he's known as nowadays.
  • DrZeek
    July 9, 2008
    DrZeek
    Miles Monroe: Where am I anyhow, I mean, what happened to everybody, where are all my friends?
    Dr. Aragon: You must understand that everyone you knew in the past has been dead nearly two hundred years.
    Miles Monroe: But they all ate organic rice!

    Woody Allen plus Science Fictio... read moren equals a very funny premise for a movie. This is a wonderful idea that Allen has come up with, implanting his character into a futuristic world.

    [Miles gets to look at some pictures to identify the people on them]
    Miles Monroe: This was Josef Stalin. He was a communist, I was not too crazy about him, had a bad mustache, lot of bad habits. This is Bela Lugosi. he was, he was the mayor of New York city for a while, you can see what it did to him there, you know. This is, uhm, this is, uh, Charles DeGaulle, he, he was a very famous French chef, had his own television show, showed you how to make souflets and omelettes and everything.

    Allen is Miles Munroe. Miles has just been awoken from a 200 year sleep following one of those standard accidents where a person ends up being preserved and awoken in the future.

    Seen as a threat, Miles is immediately sought by the authorities and forced to be on the run. Miles is alerted by a group of scientists that he must attempt to find an underground activist group looking to overthrow the possibly corrupt government.

    Miles Monroe: I'm not really the heroic type. I was beat up by Quakers.

    Along the way, Miles meets a futuristic poet and hippie, Luna played by Diane Keaton in her first Woody Allen movie, and the two eventually flee together, and attempt to put a stop to possible corruptness, although true to Allen form, there is never a good answer involving leaders.

    Besides the plot, this movie is of course about Allen interacting in a futuristic world. The portrayal of the future Allen has created is very funny while containing various elements of plausibility, making the film serve as a satirical take on human progression.

    It also helps that Woody Allen's dialog matches how great of a physical comedian he can be. There is a sequence where he has to impersonate a robot, which is hysterical. Keaton and Allen also have great chemistry throughout this film.

    Very funny movie.

    Luna Schlosser: What's it feel like to be dead for 200 years?
    Miles Monroe: Like spending a weekend in Beverly Hills.
  • superclerk25
    April 25, 2008
    superclerk25
    Not funny and pretty boring and stupid. It really amazes me that he makes as many movies as he does.

View All Sleeper Reviews

Critic Reviews

Dave Kehr
June 4, 2007
Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

As a stand-up routine it's a scream. Full Review

Derek Elley
May 20, 2005
Derek Elley, Variety

The film is loaded with throwaway literacy and broad slapstick, and while it fumbles the end, the parade of verbal and visual amusement is pleasant as long as it lasts. Full Review

Roger Ebert
October 23, 2004
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Sleeper is the closest Allen has come to classic slapstick-and-chase comedy, and he's good at it. Full Review

Vincent Canby
May 20, 2003
Vincent Canby, New York Times

Sleeper is terrific. Full Review

Fernando F. Croce
November 26, 2009
Fernando F. Croce, CinePassion

Allen's investigation of a "cosmic screwing" registers Kubrickian sci-fi Full Review

June 4, 2007
TV Guide's Movie Guide

Like most of Allen's movies, this one is better than the box-office receipts would indicate; it still looks good many years after it was shot. Full Review

Dennis Schwartz
April 2, 2007
Dennis Schwartz, Ozus' World Movie Reviews

The mild comedy antics are zany and the sci-fi parody is mostly pleasant. Full Review

Derek Adams
February 9, 2006
Derek Adams, Time Out

Plenty of one-liners, and it has the best banana-skin joke in film history. Full Review

Christopher Smith
November 18, 2005
Christopher Smith, Bangor Daily News (Maine)

Chaos is a bullet that rips through "Sleeper," which helps to make it the silly, freakish hit that it is. Full Review

Christopher Null
October 30, 2005
Christopher Null, Filmcritic.com

Pound for pound and minute for minute, Sleeper may just have more laughs in it than any other Woody Allen movie. Full Review

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Facts

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    • Miles Monroe: What does it feel like to be dead 200 years? Like spending a weekend in Beverly Hills.
    • Miles Monroe: That's a BIG chicken...
    • Miles Monroe: She thinks I'm a pervert because I drank our water bed.
    • Luna Schlosser: It?s hard to believe that you haven?t had sex for two hundred years.
    • Miles Monroe: Two hundred and four, if you count my marriage.
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Sleeper Trivia

  • In what movie does Diane Keaton tell Woody Allen: "Miles, do you know that 'God' spelled backwards is 'dog'?"  Answer »
  • In which movie does Woody Allen say the following? "That's a big chicken."  Answer »
  • In this movie a character yells to the sky "....Father, the sleeper has awoken."  Answer »
  • In the movie Sleeper, which of the following has been proven to be one of the best things for you?  Answer »
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