Sleeping With the Enemy (1991)

In 1991 Julia Roberts was huge. Probably the biggest movie star of the year, certainly the biggest female star.

But how do we know it was her who was big, and not just someone lucky enough to star in good movies? Sleeping with the Enemy.

A film like this is sort of a rite of passage for a rising star. Michael J. Fox had his, with the incredibly mediocre yet surprise hit The Secret of My Success; ditto Sandra Bullock’s mega-cutesy While You Were Sleeping.

I mean, you could argue that Roberts’ smash Pretty Woman owed at least part of its success to its modern-day fairy tale script and steadying performance by Richard Gere. Steel Magnolias was based on an acclaimed play, with fine work by a stellar cast. Flatliners had a pretty nifty concept; it too was more of an ensemble.

But in Sleeping With the Enemy, she’s on her own. She has no support from the two male drips with whom she co-stars, and the story is merely a well-mounted Lifetime Movie-of-the-Week. There is literally nothing else in the movie that can account for its success. And it was a success – to the tune of 170 million dollars – ironically the movie that knocked Home Alone off its number-one perch after nearly three months (both are Fox films). And it’s for this reason that I’m including it as my own personal choice for this collection.

And goddamned it if it doesn’t actually work – barely. It’s all due to Julia: she keeps the whole thing afloat (pun intended; you’ll see what I mean) with her incomparably empathic performance – you really feel for her and, most importantly, you just want her to be happy. In every scene she’s in, every fiber of your investment is in her; she bends fragility and vulnerability with just the right amount of spark and spunk. Women want to be her best gal friend and men want to fall in love with her – everyone wants to rescue her. Few, if any, modern movie starts possess this innate screen quality; you’d probably have to go all the way back to Marilyn Monroe for the last time we’ve seen it.

The plot? It’s just a vehicle, pure and simple. Julia’s in a woefully abusive marriage with a real scumbucket (Patrick Bergin); one night they go sailing off the coast, and she falls into the water, assumed dead since she can’t swim. But wait! She’d been waiting for this moment for a long time – because she’d been taking swim lessons at the Y, and managed to get to shore, where she can now start a new life, in Iowa! She rents a house that looks like it was furnished by Restoration Hardware, and forges a friendship in the form of a chic-mullet sporting local college drama teacher (Kevin Anderson). Romance inevitably follows, but not so fast – Bergin’s in town, having tracked her down through location of her ailing mother. He sneaks into her house, knocks her new beau out and prepares to kill her, but not before she kills him first. She shoots him a few times, but that still doesn’t keep him from getting up one last time in a post-fake-death attack.

Sleeping came out during of wave of films that fit in the “Don’t rust your lover” subgenre, essentially begun by the surprise success of 1987’s Fatal Attraction. You know the type – everything seems normal, but then, the One You Trusted turns out to be a real whacko, all leading up to the inevitable gunplay, and the aforementioned fake-death. But Sleeping cuts to the chase early on – the husband is revealed as the whack within the first ten minutes. That’s because the film follows another subgenre popular in the early 90s: the “Go to a rustic, pastoral place and you’ll find true love and happiness” subgenre. (Doc Hollywood, City Slickers) Well, she does, and then we get those associated clichés: the carnival scene, the first-date dinner scene, the music montage, etc. Sleeping couldn’t be more commercially cobbled – it plays like a perfect early 90s timepiece what with its timely tropes.

 But despite many dated elements (including the men’s hair and Bergin’s villainous moustache), it holds up as well as it could, again due to Roberts. In fact, there’s not a whole lot of difference between the sensationalism in this as compared to that in the recent release The Girl on the Train, with both films sharing a rescuing, lead female performance. It just shows how a healthy dose of star power can equal any number of screenwriters, any amount of special effects, any budget.

And in the case of Roberts, I’m not kidding. Her salary throughout the nineties kept increasing until, in 2000, she became the first woman to net 20 million for the film Erin Brokovich. Clearly, Hollywood figured out she was worth her weight in gold.

But her work in Sleeping notwithstanding, the film wasn’t exactly a critical darling, and it hasn’t turned into much of a classic over the years either. But if you’re so inclined, and want to see Julia Roberts at the top of her game, check it out.

As a postscript, I’ve got a story to share. I was given the chance to see the film with my parents, at the Shore Mall Towne 16, during my Spring Break from college. But I instead opted for the DeNiro film Guilty By Suspicion, which I enjoyed very much. And as a college student and Film major, I couldn’t be bothered with pop-Hollywood tripe (even though they were both studio pics). But my folks liked their choice, and secretly I always wondered if I had missed something. Now I finally realize that I didn’t.

Rating:  **1/2