WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING (1995)
A Film Review Copyright Dragan Antulov 2003
Increasing cost of Hollywood blockbusters is often attributed to astronomically high star salaries. Whether such salaries are justified or not is the question often asked, especially after movies fail to deliver quality proportional to the budget and hype. However, there are some instances when top actors indeed earn every single penny of their salaries. WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING, 1995 romantic comedy directed by Jon Turtletaub, is one of such films.
The protagonist of the film is Lucy Moderatz (played by Sandra Bullock), Chicago train ticket seller who lives alone and dreams of having family. The only bright spot in her otherwise dull life is Peter (played by Peter Gallagher), commuter who comes at her station every morning and becomes source of Lucy's romantic fantasies. Such fantasies nearly turn into nightmare when Peter gets mugged and falls in front of incoming train. Lucy saves his life and brings him to hospital where she is mistaken for his fiancee. With Peter in coma and his family delighted to see their estranged son with such a sweet girl, Lucy simply can't find courage to tell the truth. The ruse continues, but Peter's brother Jack (played by Bill Pullman) is mistrustful towards Lucy, although his suspicions are less motivated with concern about family and more with plain old jealousy towards brother.
Just like many other 1990s Hollywood romantic comedies, WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING isn't particularly funny. Script by Daniel G. Sullivan and Fredric Le Bow isn't inspired and its saccharine plot gives new definition of predictability. Even those viewers that never bothered to watch trailer wouldn't have much problems in figuring out the plot developments, situations and final outcome of the film. Yet, despite all that, WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING is solid piece of light-hearted entertainment, mostly thanks to the excellent performance by Sandra Bullock, actress who seemed to be born for the roles like this one. Bullock with her attractive but unglamorous image gives humanity and little bit of realism to otherwise fairytale plot. In doing so she is helped by Bill Pullman with whom she has good chemistry, and the rest of cast is also very good. In the end, those who miss WHILE YOU WERE SLEEPING wouldn't have many reasons to regret it, but those who watch it would have even less reasons to complain.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
Review written on May 30th 2003
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax http://film.purger.com - Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom/Movie Reviews in Croatian http://www.purger.com/users/drax/reviews.htm - Movie Reviews in English http://www.ofcs.org - Online Film Critics Society
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