Review: Sleeping With the Enemy

Julia Roberts is Laura, a battered young wife who lives in a beach house that is more like a prison than a home. Here she is beaten, controlled, and used by her monster of a husband Martin (Patrick Bergin). Martin is a classic controlling thug with a side order of OCD, who needs to have everything just so (towels perfectly arranged on the rack, spices exactly placed in the cupboards, etc). He goes into a jealous rage if a man even so much as glances at his beautiful young wife. However, Laura, unbeknownst to her husband, has been working on her escape for quite a while it seems. A night on the stormy seas with a neighbour who owns a boat offers up her perfect opportunity to fake her own death and escape. You see, Martin thinks Laura can’t swim and is afraid of the water, but in reality she has been getting swimming lessons whilst pretending to have a part-time job. Now she can move to a new town, changing her look and identity to start afresh. She even tentatively strikes up a relationship with a nice local drama teacher (played by Kevin Anderson). Unfortunately, Martin eventually gets wise to what has happened (through a plot contrivance that may have your eyes permanently rolled into the back of your head), and sets about reclaiming his ‘possession’.

 

Probably Julia Roberts’ best-ever performance, this Joseph Ruben (“The Stepfather”, “The Good Son”) domestic psycho-thriller from 1991 would be really uncomfortable if it were pitched more realistically. In my view, the underrated Ruben and screenwriter Ronald Bass (“Gardens of Stone”, “Rain Man”) do the right thing in making it just a bit schlocky (a little like Ruben’s masterful B-movie “The Stepfather”), otherwise it might just be unbearable for the masses.

 

I prefer “Mystic Pizza” as a film, but I really do think this is the best performance Julia Roberts has ever given. I know her push-up bra won an Oscar for “Erin Brockovich” but sometime after this film, it felt like for me that a light went off from inside her as an actress. Whatever that light was, whatever she lost (charisma, star quality, lust for life…I don’t know) she still hasn’t gotten it back and has subsequently been quite an off-putting, grumpy screen presence for me. Here she’s perfectly cast, able to convey a mousy victim but also convince as someone able to get out of that situation and try to set up a new life. This was clearly a star vehicle for her and it was a perfectly chosen one, I think. She’s easy to sympathise with in this one. For a film that doesn’t get much love (or even get talked about much) these days, it was a pretty big hit in its day at the box-office, and was right in the middle of Roberts’ time as a top star. However, things might’ve come crashing down pretty bloody quickly if she wore that idiotic plaited ponytail for more than one scene here. Seriously, never do that again, Julia.

 

For me, though, the real star of the film is actually Irish actor Patrick Bergin having his one brief moment in the sun before…well, I have no freaking idea why he didn’t become a more lasting star after this film. He’s still around, but this really has been his best moment on screen. Like Terry O’Quinn in “The Stepfather”, Ruben has found another iconic villain in Bergin’s creepily intense, controlling (and all-round obsessive compulsive) Martin. The way his character treats Roberts’ Laura as a child and also a possession is truly creepy, because although there’s a heightened pitch, there are guys out there like this. Yes, the thing with the towels and jars of spices is a schlocky Norman Bates thing, but anal retentive and obsessive compulsive people out there do exist, and when you combine that with all the controlling and possessive behaviour, it’s seriously unsettling, and only slightly darkly amusing. Being that this is in essence a schlocky psycho-thriller, the whole stacked cupboards and perfectly aligned towels as signifiers are also really quite brilliant in how they pay off later for thriller purposes. Say what you will about Ruben, but the man knows what works in a thriller. I don’t understand how or why Bergin hasn’t managed to be this memorable since nor offered much of an opportunity, but if everyone has at least one great performance in them, this is Bergin’s. I really do think the two central performances in this film have been severely overlooked all these years.

 

I was also really impressed with the chilly imagery in the film, whether it’s the rather anti-septic beachside abode the couple live in, or the dead trees and stormy skies outside in the opening 25 minutes. That’s almost Gothic imagery, and it really evokes a sense of dread as we are witness to a poor young woman seemingly trapped in a violent marriage. When you add the truly powerful, chilling music of Berlioz as essentially Martin’s rape-y calling card…it’s really sinister stuff (By the way, in a particularly creepy bit of trivia, that piece of music was Bergin’s own suggestion!). Although that Berlioz piece is the most memorable piece of music in the film, the great Jerry Goldsmith (“A Patch of Blue”, “Planet of the Apes”, “The Omen”) nonetheless contributes a terrific and varied music score.

 

If the film does have a flaw, and boy does it, that flaw’s name is Kevin Anderson. As the new, nice guy in Laura’s life after her escape, he’s goofy as hell and not even remotely studly. Poor casting there, he looks like Bob Frigging Seger, too. Lyle Lovett was bad enough to imagine, no one wants to see Julia Roberts romantically linked to Bob Seger, surely. Or maybe they do, some of you people are weird.

 

I don’t know why everyone has a bug up their arse with this film. It’s really terrific schlock that would’ve been too difficult to watch for many if it tried to be more realistic. It’s realistic enough for me, especially whenever Patrick Bergin and Julia Roberts are on screen together. A really good psycho-thriller that deserves a better reputation, I think. Of all the domestic-thrillers of the 80s and 90s (“Fatal Attraction”, “Unlawful Entry”, “Pacific Heights”, “Malice”, etc.), this and Ruben’s “The Stepfather” are at the top. It still holds up really well some 25 years later.

 

Rating: B+