While You Were Sleeping 1995

[2.5/10] While You Were Sleeping has problems. Its plot is straight up insane. Its comedy is broader than the Chicago River. All of its characters are either psychopaths or cartoon characters. Every major plot point requires some tremendous coincidence or misunderstanding to make sense. And for some godforsaken reason, director Jon Turteltaub goes all in on hacky Italian stereotype Joe Jr. for scene after agonizing scene.

But the movie might still function, or at least be passable, if the central romance worked. Lucy is a token-taker with a lonely heart and a winning smile. Jack is a cozy carpenter with a kind disposition and the standard floppy haircut of the mid-nineties. It’s not crazy. While You Were Sleeping wouldn’t be the first or the last romcom to throw two good-looking actors together on screen for a while and hope that suffices for romance.

Except it doesn’t. Turtletaub and writers Daniel G. Sullivan and Fredric Lebow use every stock romcom trick in the book to try to make them feel cute together, and the effort comes off transparent and phony. They fall into each other’s arms on the ice; they gaze longingly into each other’s eyes before being conveniently interrupted; they have wacky sitcom energy while trying to haul a couch into an apartment together. I won’t deny that there’s some chemistry there, but despite the insanity surrounding it, the actual rhythms of the romance are so paint-by-numbers that there’s hardly an ounce of genuine human feeling left by the time the credits roll.

It doesn’t help that the film tries to make up for that via the sort of terrible 1990s score that was ubiquitous in middlebrow movies of the time. The sappy, saccharine tones of a phony sounding piano and strings combo spitting sickly sweet melodies communicates a level of heart While You Were Sleeping never comes close to earning. Throw in oddly-deposited B-roll footage of Chicago, and tin-eared dialogue that lacks any truth or sincerity, and the actors were working from a nigh-insurmountable deficit from the jump.

They try though! Bill Pullman in particular does Yeoman’s work here. Frankly, he’s too good for this movie. While most of the film veers between over-the-top farce and cloying attempts at heart, Pullman’s Jack brings the rare bit of plausible earnestness into the film. You buy his suspicious-turned-admiring gaze toward Lucy. His scene chatting with his comatose brother of finally envying him for something has a legitimate pathos the movie can’t muster anywhere else. And the scene where he confesses to his father (Peter Boyle, another performer punching above the material) that he doesn’t want to inherit the family business, and gets acceptance rather than rejection, has a warmth and a sweetness that the rest of While You Were Sleeping is utterly bereft of.

You’ll note that his best scenes are the ones where Sandra Bullock’s Lucy is completely absent. That's not a coincidence. I don’t want to slag the actress too hard. She has a few good moments in this film. Her stoopside conversation with protective neighbor Saul (Jack Warden, who tries his best to turn chicken shit into chicken salad with some mixed results), where they communicate to one another that each has the Callaghan family’s best interests at heart without saying it outright is well done. And the scene where Lucy watches the Callaghans celebrate the playful, big family-filled Xmas she never had is lightly touching. If this were a movie entirely about a lonely, orphaned young woman finding a family to belong to, and excised the romance element, Bullock might be up to it.

Instead, she’s thrust into too many wacky scenes and faux-romantic moments, and she plays each of them so one-note. She flashes the smile. She laughs the same giggly laugh. She fumfers and mumbles like the female Hugh Grant that she is. And that's it! It doesn’t matter whether the scene’s supposed to be sincere or zany or passionate; she plays it the same way every time. It’s not without its charms, but you can only play the “Ain't I adorable?” card so many times before it becomes exhausting. With that approach, Lucy herself scans as such a generic romcom protagonist, that between the performance and the character, Lucy is just too thinly-drawn and presented to support the type of romance necessary to save such an insanely constructed story.

Because Lucy and Jack are monsters.

Alright, maybe that's too far. Lucy is definitely creepy. She’s memorized the routine of a stranger passing through her turnstiles and fantasizes about him in a way that is, at best, unhealthy, and at worst, spine-chilling. She lovingly caresses his childhood photos after being mistakenly given his personal effects after an accident. The way she tells him “You always gave me something to look forward to every day” after he wakes from his coma has unnerving, Talk to Her vibes to it.

But to the screenwriters’ credit, they bend over backwards to make her somewhere “below” culpable for posing as the fiancee of a man she doesn’t know and worming her way into his family. They have to utterly contort the situation into byzantine levels of absurdity to make it so that she’s only mistakenly identified as the coma guy’s betrothed, and talked into keeping up the ruse for sake of a grieving family, is conveniently stopped at every turn before she can confess, and even saves his life to earn some good samaritan points despite the deception.

However disturbing the basic premise of While You Were Sleeping, you can tell someone read this script and realized how skin-crawling this plot sounds, and told the filmmakers, “I don’t care how much we have to bend or break the limits of plausibility; contrive a series of situations that prevent Lucy from coming off like a lying stalker.” And by god, it’s not terribly elegant, but they do.

The problem is threefold. First, even as the writers twist the narrative to exonerate Lucy, they still want to derive tension from the fact that she’s living this lie and could get found out at any moment, especially by Jack. So that means they have to spin a series of hackneyed coincidences that give her just the right info to pull the wool over the Calaghans’ eyes, or be overheard at just the wrong time in just the wrong way to give Jack some shallow misimpression, or avoid/run into just the right person to be able to escape scrutiny. There’s contrivance in any romcom, but While You Were Sleeping practically runs on it.

Second, once the coma guy wakes up, and the noble reasons for Lucy to keep up the charade have theoretically evaporated, the movie kicks into an even crazier and zanier gear, with a mistaken case of amnesia, the interjection of a rich bitch ex, and for some baffling reason, neighbor Jack pushing Lucy and the coma guy into marriage despite the fact that they don’t know one another and have nothing in common beyond liking the same shirt.

For a high concept movie like While You Were Sleeping you can almost excuse the utterly bonkers setup of the film as a gimme that's necessary for the price of admission. But even once the “pretending to be a coma guy’s fiancee for the good of his family” part of the movie is done, it only gets more confounding and ridiculous from there. Hell, the character I like the most in this one is Lucy’s boss, Jerry, because he’s the only person in the film who has the appropriately aghast response to all of this and points out how utterly insane it is.

Third, and most damning, is the fact that even if you want to throw out the early deception as white lies, and even if you want to set aside the later, heightened nonsense as standard romcom escalation, Lucy and Jack seem like terrible people in this. Sure, Lucy’s intentions might be pure with the Callaghans in general, but she’s openly flirting with the brother of the guy she’s pretending to be engaged to, in a way that's just wrong. And likewise, while Jack tries to restrain himself, he all but puts the moves on a woman he believes to be his comatose sibling’s fiancee.

Who the fuck does that? The movie wants you to be okay with all of this because Pulman and Bullock are attractive Hollywood stars who smile a lot at each other, and because it’s “twue wuv”. But my god, if you stop to think about it for two seconds, their extended flirtation that all but powers the film is utterly horrifying, and all but sinks the romance.

Despite the horror, I want to be charitable to While You Were Sleeping. Buried somewhere beneath all that drek and creepiness is a solid moral about chasing something imagined and finding something real. The movie spends more time on cheap meetcutes and cheaper romantic misunderstandings, but stuck behind them is a worthwhile story of a lonely person who lost one family and comes to love another, beyond the woodworking himbo she’s smitten with this week. And however stock the romance, Lucy and Jack have arcs and wants apart from their dalliance, focused on seeing the world and gaining one’s independence respectively, that give them each some life in the story apart from the disastrous relationship at its center. With a very different telling, you could salvage what’s worthwhile from this film.

But it would mean whittling, changing, and outright jettisoning so much of the film as is for any of it to work, starting with the completely dire humor here. There are fainting nurses, non-sequitur grandmothers, testicle-checking interludes, leering hospital roommates, and scene after scene after excruciating scene of Joe Junior’s insulting “goombah”-style antics that make you wonder which producer the actor had incriminating pictures of.

It all adds up to a film that aims to be cozy, charming, and heartwarming, and yet ends up being utterly devoid of humanity. These are not real people. They do insane things. Their hangers on devolve into pratfalls and cheap seats shtick. Their relationships are founded on ludicrous coincidences and deranged romances.

That could work if this were nothing but an outsized comedy. Instead, it wants to tug on your heartstrings and make you buy into a pairing that is, generously, misguided, and less generously, utterly galling in how the film arrives at it. You can’t have it both ways. You can do a wacky high concept comedy about a weird and blackly comic situation, or you can tell an authentic story about real people falling in love under unusual circumstances. When you try to do both, you end up with a complete misfire like While You Were Sleeping, a movie that's both baffling on a conceptual level, and almost painful on a scene-to-scene basis. If the alternative is to be subjected to this movie and its demented view of relationships and romance, then what can I say, I think the putz who stayed in the coma had the right idea.