SAVAGE CINEMA'S BURIED TREASURE: "SLEEP WITH ME" (1994)

"SLEEP WITH ME" (1994)
Written by Duane Dell’Amico & Roger Hedden & Neal Jimenez & Joe Keenan & Rory Kelly & Michael Steinberg
Directed by Rory Kelly

As much as I would consider myself to possess a certain high level of romanticism, I am actually not that much of a fan of movie love stories.

I would suppose that for my personal sensibilities, movie love stories often tend to feel trite, hackneyed, commonplace, stale and at their worst, just so pedestrian, emotionally false and too corny to be swept away by. With movie after movie that features a love story, I tend to not feel terribly attached to the goings on between the two souls circling each other and destined to join together in the final reel. This is mostly because I am very aware of movie conventions and know firmly that the union must occur just because the script says so. More intensely, I rarely feel that the emotions depicted upon the screen properly emulate emotions in the real world, making for film romances that just feel too easy when I would prefer something a bit tougher, messier and presented with more urgency, euphoria or sorrow or something that makes the romance a bit more hard fought.

Of course there have been many films and filmmakers that have spoken to me very deeply and have continued to resonate over the years. For example and certainly my heroes John Hughes and Cameron Crowe, time and again, delivered a cinematic romanticism that straddled the fence between fantasy and unshakeable emotional truth with unapologetic sympathy, elegance, bravado and a heart as open and as wide as the sky.

Kevin Smith’s controversial “Chasing Amy” (1997), one of his very best films, was a love story that left me exhausted in its wake and in the most positive and satisfying way. The emotional messiness in the love triangle relationship between comic book writer/artist Holden McNeil (Ben Affleck), his writing/illustrating partner Banky Edwards (Jason Lee) and Alyssa Jones (Joey Lauren Adams), the lesbian comic book writer/illustrator he falls in love with was an undeniably fresh experience that burst through all of the clichés of the romance genre. It was completely uncompromising and felt so brutally honest in its depiction of the difficult levels of friendship, love and human sexuality while also being extremely funny with its brilliantly written and gleefully graphic dialogue.

Sometimes, the epic sweep of a film can send messages of romance through me like a tidal wave and in places so unexpected as Sam Raimi’s “Spider-Man 2” (2004) and Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008) are recent examples. And in my Time Capsule series from last year, I listed Michel Gondry’s “Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind” (2004) as the past decade’s best love story as it delved so beautifully into the nature of how and why we all fall in love and how our perceptions and memories are often unreliable. It was the film that asked the question of whether the person we love is exactly as they exist or who we perceive them to be. Not the sort of depth you usually tend to witness, especially if it is a film starring someone like Sandra Bullock, Jennifer Aniston or Kate Hudson.

For this special Valentine’s Day edition of my ”Buried Treasure” series, I am happy to point you to a small independent film from Director Rory Kelly entitled “Sleep With Me,” the story of an unusual love triangle starring Eric Stoltz, Craig Sheffer and Meg Tilly. While somewhat unassuming and not necessarily designed for mass appeal, the film is wry, quite talkative and deeply perceptive. And within its brisk 86 minute running time, “Sleep With Me” presents engaging characters, filled with dry and sardonic quips masking tender emotional wounds making a film that ultimately explores the nature of young relationships and marriage in particular. With Kelly’s quiet, unforced direction steering the production, what we have is a sharp romantic comedy that works well as an antidote to the glut of brainless big budget fluff being released week to week in our multiplexes.

Reuniting after their work together in John Hughes and Howard Deutch’s lovely and underrated “Some Kind Of Wonderful” (1987), Stoltz and Sheffer star as friends and former college roommates, Joseph, a landscaper and Frank, wayward, lonely and unemployed. The third figure in this love triangle is Sarah (Meg Tilly), a schoolteacher who happens to be Joseph’s longtime on again/off again girlfriend and at the start of the film has accepted Joseph’s marriage proposal during a road trip. The catch is that Frank has been nursing a long running and deeply felt love for Sarah while Sarah cannot deny an attraction to Frank.

The film charts the course of this love triangle almost strictly through a series of social events between the threesome and their circle of friends (the aforementioned road trip, two card games, an afternoon wedding rehearsal party, a summertime barbecue, an Sunday afternoon get-together and a climactic house party). Secrets are confessed. Boundaries are crossed. Relationships are tested. And all the while, Joseph, Frank and Sarah begin to take their respective baby steps into the world of adult relationships as they each learn the responsibilities inherent to those relationships.

The most unique facet of "Sleep With Me" is that the film carries no less than six screenwriters. While the style of the film is not so complicated where it needed six brains to piece it all together, what this film accomplishes, I think is pretty ingenious as each writer handles one particular social events in the film. This technique is actually carried off so effortlessly and seamlessly that it never once calls attention to itself in a negative, ponderous or self-congratulatory way. Kelly, his writers and cast have truly mined the nature of this triangle in a realistic fashion as “Sleep With Me,” while exhibiting some slapstick moments, never dissolves into cartoonish antics and behavior that can only exist in the movies due to some prefabricated flash.

In addition to the terrific trio of leading performances (of which I will return to shortly), “Sleep With Me” also features terrific performances from the entire supporting cast including Todd Field, Dean Cameron as a wheelchair bound friend who seriously enjoys his poker games and Joey Lauren Adams and Parker Posey, as two friends who nearly derail that aforementioned card game. And if this film is famous for anything at all, it is for a section of the house party sequence starring none other than Quentin Tarantino who hilariously espouses his views on how “Top Gun” (1986) is actually the greatest homoerotic masterpiece of its time! He and the observations of that film are so brilliant you will not see it in the same way ever again!

The usually sensitive and mild mannered Eric Stoltz is a surprise in this film as he displays an unusual amount of prickliness and reaches unprecedented levels of anger and recrimination. His character of Joseph is hot tempered, even during those card games (he cannot stand innocuous “table talk”) and usually possesses a certain cavalier wit that comes off as coldly unsympathetic. By the time Frank’s love for Sarah is revealed during a alcohol fueled house party, Stoltz always finds convincing levels of jealousy, betrayal, suspicion, and romantic paranoia that is justified as well as being understandably oft-putting to Sarah. In some ways, Joseph is hard to love as in addition to his temper and possessiveness, he seems to lack the tenderness that Sarah enjoys in Frank. Joseph is the kind of man who would get blindingly drunk at his own wedding rehearsal party, rendering him incapacitated. he is also the type of man who would publicly call out his wife for her transgressions. But, again, Stoltz makes him understandable and compelling.

Craig Sheffer’s Frank and his level of obsessiveness would be downright creepy if Sheffer was not able to discover the correct romantic tone to play. Frank is indeed a heart-on-sleeve romantic who is ruled by his emotions and just cannot help himself. Rational thought is simply lost on this man as he foolishly pursues the married Sarah. But, in some ways, you almost cannot blame him as Sarah does send him a series of mixed messages that begins with a romantic confession from her on the eve of her wedding, continues with a shared kiss and culminates in a surprising erotic act. Sarah’s confusion and attraction to Frank, with his more sensitive qualities and little boy lost demeanor, fuels Frank while also confusing and devastating him. He is a man, while not faultless in his actions and how they affect a marriage, but he is not entirely to blame either. He is the man who knows in the deepest parts o his heart that the chemistry between himself and Sarah is real and that knowledge is what causes his undoing within the social structure of their friends.

As Sarah, Meg Tilly is no faceless female or bland object of desire. You can easily see why both men are in love with her as she does carry a quiet sultriness, an alluring intelligence and an inner resolve where we can see and understand what she sees in both men, why she would marry Joseph and why she would find herself bewitched by Frank’s adoration. Her attraction to Frank is obviously due to the fact that she enjoys his attentiveness, is enchanted by his romanticism and how he hangs upon her every word, especially in ways Joseph does not seem to. In fact, Sarah’s confusion and struggle seems to speak for the collective struggle of all of the film’s characters in regard to adult relationships. And this is where this seemingly small film shows its larger ambitions.

During a section in the film’s midpoint, the action drifts away from the members of the love triangle and extends to their friends, which includes aspiring screenwriter Duane (Todd Field) and his acerbic wife Deborah (Susan Traylor), British married couple Nigel and Amy (Thomas Gibson and Amaryllis Borrego), the tender hearted Rory (Tegan West) and the acerbic Leo (Dean Cameron). With this group, “Sleep With Me” extends itself from romantic comedy by richly capturing the angst, longing, wistfulness and restlessness of the 20s in ways that the odious “Reality Bites” (1994) could not even hope to depict realistically. For a film this nuanced and as much as it is a film about falling in love, “Sleep With Me” works best as film about staying in love, especially when all of the protagonists are just beginning to figure out their respective stations in the world as well as with each other. As Duane and Joseph share a cigarette after the disastrous house party where Frank has openly expressed his love for Sarah, Duane expresses, after Deborah has paged him from the house interior, “Sometimes I get sick of hearing the sound of my own name.” With that one line, we are witness to the growing pains inside young marriages as the realization of the necessary work involved with maintaining relationships has taken hold, forcing them all into adulthood.

"Sleep With Me" is not a film that will change the world or alter your perceptions but it is a very good film that I have returned to over and again over the years (usually and surprisingly whenever I have been forced to stay at home from work due to illness--it is a great "comfort movie" for me). I am so happy to share this film with you and I encourage you to try and seek it out, not only for this Valentine's Day, but for anytime at all when you are seeking a good love story, especially one that is more realistic, unique, urgent and as heartfelt as this one.