I cannot understand why both the term and the film Sleeping with the Enemy are so popular. Julia Roberts showed that her drawing power was immense given how Sleeping with the Enemy is not a particularly good film. The film is not terrible, but it has some really bad elements that sink it.
Laura Burney (Roberts) seems to be living a charmed life. She lives in an elegant beach home and is married to successful investment consultant Martin (Patrick Bergin). He is eerily calm except when having sex to Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. He also enjoys smacking Laura around. Dinner must be ready at the exact time. The towels must be exactly at the same length. He quietly but forcefully pushes her to wear a black dress rather than the white one that Laura planned to wear.
This psychotic Phinneas Fogg is always apologetic after they "quarrel", but Laura is deeply unhappy and has no way out. To add to her tragedy, Laura dies when she falls overboard during a storm while sailing. Laura, who cannot swim, is declared dead even though her body never surfaced.
It is immediately clear that Laura is anything but dead. In fact, she is newly alive. She had secretly learned to swim, and the storm was the perfect way to escape her abusive husband. Now, after three years, seven months and three days, she is finally free of Martin. She goes from Massachusetts to Iowa, near the nursing home that Laura secretly smuggled her into. Now going by Sara Waters (how clever), she is starting over in the bucolic town of Cedar Falls.
She also starts catching the eye of Ben Woodward (Kevin Anderson), her next-door neighbor. He is a former actor who has relocated back to his hometown, where he is one of the drama teachers at the local college. He is attracted to Sara but also knows that she is hiding something. It is not long, however, before Martin finds out that Laura may have faked her death. A condolence call from a former swim classmate lets him in on her aquatic skills. He finds the wedding ring that she had attempted to flush down months ago.
Martin now keeps digging as Sara and Ben start getting closer. Will Martin literally commit murder to get Laura back? Will Laura/Sara realize the danger that she is in when she sees the food cans all perfectly aligned?
I know that Sleeping with the Enemy was wildly popular upon its release. It isn't as if the film does not start out well. As silly as some of the plot conveniences were (the storm, the getaway, having enough money to pay $700/month for a rental home despite not having any visible job), I kept rolling with the story. As the film went on, however, the suspension of disbelief was becoming harder and harder to hold. Sleeping with the Enemy uses my Number One Golden Rule of Filmmaking: Something Will Happen if the Plot Requires It To.
The plot requires that Martin find the unflushed wedding ring. The plot requires that Laura/Sara realize that Martin has found her when she sees the bath towels and food cans perfectly straight. It does not matter that the toilet had not been used for many months, otherwise how is the ring still there. It does not matter, come to think of it, that Laura did not check to see if the wedding ring did go down the toilet while Martin was caught in the storm. It does not matter that, maybe in this instance, Martin might not have been so OCD that he needed to fix the towels and not checked the food cans to straighten them out.
Did the plot, however, require Martin to be so obsessive-compulsive that he needed to start playing Symphonie Fantastique when he finally reveals himself to Laura/Sara? I guess Martin's OCD was so immense that he needed to play the creepy music from The Shining to get it on.
As I think on it, I think my main issue with Sleeping with the Enemy is that it starts getting sillier and sillier as it goes on. In order to visit her blind mother in the nursing home, Laura has to literally wear a disguise. Ben, using his acting skills, gets her what we are told is a convincing get-up. However, there is no conceivable way that Julia Roberts in drag would fool anyone into thinking that she was a man. Having Martin show up at the same time and the two of them repeatedly missing each other comes dangerously close to making this a farce.
Unfortunately, her two male costars fail spectacularly. Sleeping with the Enemy, I figure, was going to be Kevin Anderson's big breakout film. It is easy to think that given that he is the love interest of Julia Roberts in the film. Anderson, however, was total milquetoast. His first scene, where he is reenacting the Jets Song from West Side Story while watering his lawn, is already embarrassing. I said to myself, "now I know why he failed on Broadway". Anderson simply failed to be interesting. He delivered every line in this sotto voce manner and was completely stiff in every scene. I figure that director Joseph Ruben wanted Ben to be soft, a contrast to the abusive Martin. However, it went to the extreme.
This performance only succeeded in making Ben a near-total wimp. His soft delivery and gentle manner were maddening. I do not think that I have seen a flatter performance in a while as that of Kevin Anderson in Sleeping with the Enemy.
Perhaps that is why Patrick Bergin decided that it would be better to be almost cartoonishly over-the-top as our obsessive-compulsive psycho-killer. Bergin's intense eyes when he spies Ben and Laura at the county fair are funny more than they are frightening. When he learns that Laura had taken swimming lessons, the camera starts spinning around. I get that it meant to symbolize Martin's confusion. Bergin's performance here, however, should elicit laughter more than terror.
It got to a point where I thought it would have been better if Bergin and Anderson had switched roles. I thought Anderson looked creepier than Bergin. It also would have made Anderson's seeming benign manner more menacing. Conversely, Bergin as the drama teacher might have made Ben better able to fight off the murderous husband.
Ronald Bass' adaptation of Nancy Price's novel may be close to the source material. It only left me wondering how Iowa nursing homes apparently allow anyone to freely wander around, no questions asked. I also was not surprised when Martin picked the wrong drama teacher to threaten, releasing him only when the other drama teacher told him that his partner was another man.
Who ever heard of a gay drama teacher? Who also knew that Iowa had so many colleges that have a large number of drama teachers?
Sleeping with the Enemy is not quite "so bad that it's good". I can see why many people genuinely like it. The film does not tell a complicated story and puts in bits of thriller to clue you in. Straight cans were never so terrifying, I suppose. Sleeping with the Enemy is just a little short of good. I wish that Laura had taken shooting practice along with swimming classes.
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