Gormley makes something wonderful out of her brief appearance, inscribing a whole biography into the role with her commanding warmth, quietness, and contentment. Here he gives us both aging dignity and the romantic foolishness beneath its surface. Cassel acts in the muted register that worked so well for him in Rushmore, which suits him better as an actor than the manic extroversion of his youth. But somehow the awkwardness in her vocal attack makes her character appealingly vulnerable (miraculously, she actually looks like she could have been produced by the union of Bisset and Cassel). Plimpton lays the cultivated Bostonian act on a mite too aggressively, a little like a runner jumping the gun. (If you look at any given scene from this film on its own, it seems disconnected, wayward ö it only works as one complete entity.) If acting was the major problem with Color of a Brisk and Leaping Day, it’s the strong suit here. Münch’s sense of place ö just barely glimpsed but always ultra-specific ö rises and falls with his actors, on whom he leans heavily to keep all the disparate strands together. It’s quiet, unadorned moments like this that make up the movie. He gets directly at the essense of an old, revered academic as his self-respect momentarily crumbles. And the stricken look on Cassel’s face once he realizes that Bisset has gone is indelible: completely in the moment, unhighlighted, and candidly awkward. Her voice rises in anger with every attempt at a defensively polite answer, until she has to leave the room and vomit. There’s also a very good, tough moment where Bisset only barely endures the prying inquisitions of her mother when she visits her in a nursing home. The keynote emotion is Plimpton’s bemusement, her quick recognition of the absurdity of this one-night stand even as she gives in to it. When Rebecca goes to Baton Rouge to oversee the takeover of the station, she improbably allows herself to be seduced by the one-time owner, super-suave ladies’ man Jimmy (Frankie Faison). Münch lets his three principal characters slowly achieve a painful insight: the past never dies, but it’s never to be repeated. Bob (Cassel) wants to make himself whole by reuniting with Frances, reincorporating himself into her life. 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. Frances, 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. Sleepy Time Gal is about searching, trying to complete one’s self, not as a quest but as a biological urge. It’s only later that you understand this moment in the balloon as elegiac, a subtle foreshadowing of two lives coming to an end before either has been fulfilled.
One moment is linked to the next without an immediately clear reason, which gives the gentle images a poetic lilt ö in fact, this is a movie that comes alive through its transitions. As he does throughout the movie, Münch drops us into the moment without a setup. A scene or two later, Frances goes up for a balloon ride with Bob, her old beau (and Betty’s husband), who is played by Seymour Cassel. But that’s a small defect in the face of so many exemplary virtues, not the least of which is a firm grasp of where people are at in their lives at any given moment, how they measure themselves against their own ideal self-images, how their unfulfilled needs and desires plague their lives. The talk gets a little too declarative, less genuinely conversational than it might be, as it does in a lot of Sleepy Time Gal. The unspoken rivalry between the goodly wife Betty and the more unsettled Frances dissolves into the warmth of instant rapport. The emotional tone is very precise: two middle-aged women, respective wife and former mistress of a well-loved man, sitting on the bed of a comfy, low-ceilinged room at the end of a sunny fall day, in an atmosphere of homey comfort. In fact, there’s a nice moment where Betty (Peggy Gormley), a woman with a bountiful smile and a lovely mass of tangled, frizzy hair, prescribes quilting to Jacqueline Bisset’s Frances as a path to inner peace.