Word: allene
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...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...
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...