The Sleepy Time Gal
The Sleepy Time Gal is a narrative film about a remarkable woman, her family and her past lovers as she approaches death in her fifties. The film depicts this woman’s relationship with her aimless son, and her longing to know her daughter, given up for adoption at birth. Falling outside the boundaries of traditional narrative film, The Sleepy Time Gal has a lyrical style appropriate to a story of reflection and reckoning. It takes place in a number of cities—New York, San Francisco, Daytona Beach, Boston, Lancaster, PA—over a number of years.
Sleepy Time Gal is about searching, trying to complete one’s self, not as a quest but as a biological urge. Frances (Bisset), who’s dying of cancer, suddenly feels the need to see the baby girl she gave up for adoption long ago ö she wants her to materialize. Rebecca (Martha Plimpton), a grown woman with an Ivy League affect and a sharp business sense that she wears like a shell, leaves New York to visit her adoptive parents in Boston and then travels to Baton Rouge to preside over the acquisition of a small radio station. Bob (Cassel) wants to make himself whole by reuniting with Frances, reincorporating himself into her life. Münch lets his three principal characters slowly achieve a painful insight: the past never dies, but it’s never to be repeated.
As usual, Münch is chasing down something exceedingly delicate. Distances across time are linked to distances in space, and characters are dispersed both emotionally and geographically, but it is all handled softly, without emphatic prodding. The final effect of Sleepy Time Gal is of a lovingly crafted patchwork quilt, sewn by hand, billowing as it falls over the bed.
Kent Jones, Film Comment (2000)
Much of the pleasure of viewing The Sleepy Time Gal lies in the transcendent performance of the great Jacqueline Bisset, who plays the eponymous heroine, a onetime radio DJ fascinated by the early history of New York City, where she grew up and where she takes her son (Nick Stahl) on a nostalgic visit to upper Washington Heights near the start of the film. As the story proceeds, Bisset's character discovers she has cancer. No, she does not find any miracle cure; it is not that kind of movie. No, the daughter she gave up for adoption (played by the undervalued Martha Plimpton) probably will not show up in time for a sob fest finale; Münch is not that kind of filmmaker. Instead, the film is about what matters in life, what we can and cannot do or undo - the difficulties and mistakes in relating to one another. Ultimately, it ponders how death rearranges all our certainties. Bisset's deathbed scene takes the breath away, especially for anyone who has ever sat vigil watching a loved one breathe their last.
B. Ruby Rich, The Nation (2001)
The most remarkable thing about Sleepy is that although it chronicles the lives of a mother and the daughter that she gave up for adoption, and although they never meet, they share a profound connection. The film’s liberal-minded characters are functional and have refreshingly worked through their “issues,” so that the biggest obstacles to their happiness are temporal and spatial instead of psychic and dysfunctional. As such, the soul searching that takes up most of the film has more interesting priorities than the feelgood nonsense expelled in films of this kind usually does. Since the characters in this film have robust lives, their contemplations do not sound like the affirmative pap that fills such films as Life as a House or American Beauty. The characters and their problems are decidedly individuals, not Everyman stand-ins for forlorn audience members.
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (2002)
Writer-director Christopher Münch's third feature, beautifully shot by Rob Sweeney, is a sad, sensitive reckoning of all the things that make up a life: the connections people make, the routes they choose to take, and all the chances they let pass. And like Münch and Sweeney's previous film, Color of A Brisk and Leaping Day, in which a young Chinese-American man tries to save a doomed Yosemite Valley railroad line during the post-WWII auto boom, it is also a sentimental elegy for all the good things that are allowed to slip away in the name of progress: freedom, personal dreams, old radio stations. The fact that Münch chooses to set this film in the early '80s is a poignant acknowledgement that the past that Frances and Rebecca must ultimately let go is already lost to the rest of us.
Ken Fox, TV Guide (2001)
Sleepy Time Gal exerts a gentle but definite narrative pull, with a style that immerses us so fully in every scene that they seem absolutely flooded with life. All of Frances's past, and her plans for a future that can only be immediate, impinge on each episode, as Mr. Münch's script deftly reveals her past and Ms. Bisset's eloquent, subdued performance creates a full sense of Frances's inner life.
Caryn James, The New York Times (2002)
The tale of a lonely, cancer-stricken woman and the long-lost daughter who quietly seeks a reunion, Christopher Münch's The Sleepy Time Gal calls to mind the classic "female weepies" of the '30s and '40s, in which the heroine's self-sacrifice leads to teary redemption. But instead of ratcheting up the melodrama and emotional catharsis, Münch (The Hours and Times, Color of A Brisk and Leaping Day) achieves something closer to the muted elegance of short fiction, informing his story with subtle narrative rhymes and poetic flashbacks that float as freely as memories.
Scott Tobias, AV Club (2002)
Bisset, of course, makes it easy to believe in Frances' allure, but she also brings a quality of wisdom and sadness, an unsentimental acceptance of the fact that a single life, even one lived to the fullest, just is not enough. The camera is right on Bisset for much of the movie, much of it filmed in close-up, revealing a performance of truth and depth.
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle (2002)
Think of summer twilight. Think of a Joao Gilberto vocal recording. You now have a rough idea of what it is like to watch Sleepy Time Gal. It is delicate, haunting, and sultry. At times, it seems so diaphanous that it is about to slip into the ether, made weightless by its own clandestine longings. Still it is exactly at those times when it tries your patience that the movie is most beguiling.
Gene Seymour, New York Newsday (2002)
Jacqueline Bisset displays extraordinary humanity as Frances. Her rapidly declining health results not in melodrama or gushy sentiment but in genuine compassion. If anything, she underplays the illness, and it is all for the better.
Eric D. Snider, EricDSnider.com (2002)
In this avowedly autobiographical story, the most moving element may be the most starkly personal—the relationship between Frances and Morgan, in which genuine affection is complicated by mutual provocation and a rueful awareness of the other’s shortcomings. Basically, she nags him, while he calmly ribs her. Several minor characters, in just a few brief scenes, suggest entire movies of their own, notably Peggy Gormley as Bob’s wife. Stahl is excellent as the director’s surrogate, aloof yet inquisitive, but the film belongs to Bisset—it is thanks in no small part to her candid and complex performance that for all its gossamer, death-haunted poetics, The Sleepy Time Gal in the end conveys the irreducible weight of a singular life.
Dennis Lim, The Village Voice (2002)
All the characters are thrown into the game of life even though they are not fully prepared, and each tries to figure out what is the best way to play it but with mixed results. What results is an unforgettable story that asks a lot of questions but supplies very few answers. It views life as an impossible experience made up of many unfulfilled desires. But what impressed me most is how the film got me to care about the characters, and that I liked them despite their flaws.
Dennis Schwartz, Movie Reviews (2003)
The core of The Sleepy Time Gal turns out to be the way mother and daughter pursue each other on parallel tracks throughout the picture, without ever meeting — a kind of poetic and mystical mirror dance that evokes the rhyming destinies of a Taiwanese watch salesman in Taipei and one of his clients in Paris in Tsai Ming-liang’s What Time Is It There?
Jonathan Rosenblum, Featured Texts (2011)
Playing a role of almost Bergmanesque intensity—a tough, lonely woman dying of cancer as she examines her past—Bisset is both convincing and radiant. Her character, Frances, is an ex-jazz disc jockey, who, during the 1950s, was the belle of Daytona Beach, Fla., and later raised a son (Nick Stahl), gave up a baby daughter for adoption and crusaded for progressive causes, never winning the fame or comfort that she deserved. At the end, she is approaching near-anonymous death in the ’80s in New York, just as that long-lost daughter, Rebecca (portrayed by Martha Plimpton), searches and learns of her mother’s life.
Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune (2021)
The Sleepy Time Gal is one of the great films about the confrontation with terminal illness; though it does not 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 do not: 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 Münch dramatizes the horror of when “To be or not to be?” is a question that one can no longer answer for oneself.
Richard Brody, The New Yorker (2023)