The Primal Power of “The Sleepy Time Gal”

Christopher Munch has a sense of history. He started his independent filmmaking career in his mid-twenties, with “The Hours and Times” (completed in 1991), a drama about the brief but consequential trip that John Lennon and the Beatles’ new manager, Brian Epstein, took to Barcelona in 1963, and followed it up with “Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day,” set in 1945, about an attempt to save a local California railroad line. His third feature, “The Sleepy Time Gal,” from 2001, which he wrote and directed, is his starriest work, and should have been something of a breakout film. Instead, it has become a rarity. Its one screening at the Quad Cinema, this Saturday afternoon, is a major event, and will be followed by a Q. & A. with Munch and the movie’s star, Jacqueline Bisset.

Munch’s approach to the past is complex, multidimensional, and traumatized. Though “The Sleepy Time Gal” is not exactly a genre film, it is a melodrama—a vision of everyday people facing the tragic conflicts of the heroes of history and legend. Melodrama has its absurdity built into it, and Munch gives that absurdity an existential tweak. “The Sleepy Time Gal” is a harrowing, emotionally punishing, bleak, and bitter view of old age—its infirmities, its regrets, its disappointments, and, especially, its proximity to death.

The film is a period piece with a double movement: it’s set mostly in the early nineteen-eighties, but the onscreen action is pulled relentlessly back toward its characters’ past, starting with the title, which was the on-air nickname of a late-night d.j. in Daytona, Florida, in the mid-nineteen-fifties. Now, in the early eighties, that former d.j., Frances (played by Bisset), the long-divorced mother of two grown sons, is diagnosed with cancer. After undergoing surgery and treatment, she travels both literally and metaphorically to explore her younger years. She heads to rural Pennsylvania, where her former lover Bob (Seymour Cassel) lives with his wife, a writer named Betty (Peggy Gormley), to whom he was already married when he and Frances had an affair, in the late fifties. Betty knows about the affair; what she doesn’t know is that Frances got pregnant, gave birth, and put the child up for adoption.

With melodrama, the grandeur of tragedy is replaced by nearly comedic coincidences and near-misses, the nobility of expression by expressive exaggerations. In “The Sleepy Time Gal,” Munch daringly portrays the mysterious crisscrossings of destinies and the seemingly metaphysical echoes of distant lives as matter-of-fact occurrences. Yet he avoids exaggerations, guiding his actors to embody the characters’ actions with a similarly modest but emotionally engaged vigor. Enter a young New York corporate lawyer named Rebecca (Martha Plimpton). When her relationship with another hard-driving young businessperson (Justin Theroux) breaks up, she heads to her adoptive parents’ home, in Boston, and discloses to them her new assignment at work—she’s going to be managing a large company’s takeover of a small radio station in Daytona.

Where this is going should be breathtakingly obvious. When Rebecca gets there, she learns, from the longtime station manager, Jimmy Dupree (Frankie Faison), about the local fame of the long-ago Sleepy Time Gal. As it happens, Rebecca is actively looking for her birth mother and confronting institutional roadblocks to gaining information about her. Meanwhile, Frances’s cancer returns and, as her condition deteriorates, Rebecca intensifies her search; the rest is spoilers.

The two protagonists’ stories, for all their apparently rigid determinism, turn out to be unusually supple frames for Munch’s fine-grained, richly nuanced observations of his characters’ subtle, emotionally impulsive behavior. He delineates the fierce bond between Frances and Bob with tender acuity, from the kiss that they share upon reuniting and Frances’s quick friendship with Betty to Bob’s awkward and unwelcome efforts to rekindle the sexual relationship. He crafts a multigenerational story involving Frances’s relationships with one son, Morgan (Nick Stahl), a twentysomething photographer who lives in San Francisco and works in a copy shop; with her mother (Carmen Zapata), a cantankerous and demanding woman who’s living in a nursing home and who, with worsening dementia, rages at Frances and Morgan and makes grotesquely racist remarks; and with her private nurse, Maggie (Amy Madigan), who becomes Frances’s most intimate companion.

Rebecca’s connection with Jimmy in Daytona, both at the radio station and at local beachside attractions, is sketched in high-relief touches, with dialogue in which he discusses his long-ago efforts to create the town’s first radio broadcast meant for Black audiences, his promotion to station manager, and his yielding the airwaves to the movie’s title character. His tales of romance and adventure also lead to a shared bottle of wine on a boardwalk and a passionately adulterous kiss. Rebecca also talks neighborhood and architecture with a New Yorker who is bringing suit against real-estate developers, discusses adoption and its legal ramifications with another young business type, and engages in passionate yet tautly professional encounters with clerks in offices that hold the information about her birth mother that she craves.

The movie is filled with archival traces of history, including images of such New York sites as the Morris-Jumel Mansion and Fraunces Tavern and what Rebecca (an amateur architectural historian) calls the last wood-frame house in Manhattan. This foreshadows the document-based fictions of Ricky D’Ambrose by showing a wide range of fictitious documents created for the movie, such as the characters’ snapshots and home movies, their postcards and letters, legal papers of various sorts, Frances’s publicity photos, a Times review of a book by Betty, and even excerpts from the text of that book, heard in voice-over (written by Alice Elliott Dark). Moreover, the story is punctuated with black-and-white footage, documentary-like images of Frances in her youth, whether as a free-spirited, intellectual New Yorker or as a radio host in Daytona. This dreamlike footage serves as a sort of interior archive of imagined memory for her and Rebecca alike, an interior documentary of their unshakable connection. In a casual conversation with a young French tourist (Clara Bellar), Frances affirms the importance of having “a picture in mind,” a near-cliché to which Munch restores primal power.

In “The Sleepy Time Gal,” the characters’ backstory is no mere filling-in of motives or explanation of behavior; it’s the embodiment of history in memory, the connection of personal experience to the societal laws and mores that determined its crucial decisions. The warping power of social norms is inextricably bound to the movie’s crucial, dreadful subject: death. “The Sleepy Time Gal” is one of the great films about the confrontation with terminal illness; though it doesn’t share the howling fury of such movies as Ingmar Bergman’s “Cries and Whispers” and Terence Davies’s “A Quiet Passion,” it no less horrifyingly depicts Frances’s decline from wary vigor to bedridden pain to final exhaustion. And it does something that those films don’t: it suffuses the end with regret and with rage, memory and imagination, weak vision and wild emotions. The movie’s pivotal dilemma involves Frances’s desire to take her own life—and shows her nearest and dearest finding good rational reasons, whether emotional or professional, for dissuading or preventing her from doing so. Locating universal tragedy in family melodrama, Munch dramatizes the horror of when “To be or not to be?” is a question that one can no longer answer for oneself. ♦