Taglines: A romantic comedy brave enough to say those three magic words.
Sleep with Me movie storyline. A menage-a-trois provides the basis for this film that consists of six short episodes containing the same three characters, each written by a different writer. Swinging L.A. residents Joseph and Sarah are going to be wed. Frank is Joseph’s best friend. He has the hots for Sarah.
He demonstrates this one night at a party when he passionately kisses her in front of everyone. He then begins actively pursuing her until she finally gives in. The episodes include Joe and Sarah’s wedding, two poker games, the fateful dinner party, and other parties, including the one where Joseph finally confronts his friend.
Sleep With Me is a 1994 American comedy-drama film directed by Rory Kelly and starring Meg Tilly, Eric Stoltz and Craig Sheffer, who play good friends that become involved in a love triangle, a relationship complicated by the marriage of Tilly’s and Stoltz’s characters.
It also features Parker Posey, Joey Lauren Adams and a cameo by Quentin Tarantino, in which he expounds on the homoerotic subtext of Top Gun to Todd Field. Six different writers wrote a scene each about the arc and development of the relation between the protagonists, including Kelly. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival.
Film Review for Sleep with Me
“Sleep With Me” is a round-robin movie with sequences written by six Hollywood screenwriters, all friends. It was cast with well-known actors, who cut their usual fees, and filmed in a few weeks at a cost said to be well into the tens of thousands. The result is not an especially good movie, but it has a surprising number of good parts to it – moments that have a life of their own.
All of the writers signed on to the basic premise, which is that Frank (Craig Sheffer) has long been in love with Sarah (Meg Tilly), who is now the wife of his best friend, Joseph (Eric Stoltz). An opening sequence shows the three of them, good buddies, driving cross country, with her head first on one guy’s shoulder and then on the other. Even on the day before her wedding, Sarah still cherishes feelings for Frank – or is she only teasing him? For him, it’s no joke.
Who knows? Frank and Sarah might have ended up together instead, if he had revealed his feelings sooner and more clearly. He makes up for lost time at a party where he does declare his love, leading to bad feelings with Joseph and a messy ongoing situation in which he turns up unannounced, his heart bleeding for her, at inappropriate moments. (At one point he climbs in through a bedroom window at a party and pledges his love in the bathroom.)
The problem with this romantic triangle is that it goes around and around without ever really engaging our interest. What’s good about the movie isn’t the main story, but the stuff that director Rory Kelly has jammed into the crevices. There’s a funny scene involving a male poker game invaded by women players who aren’t really interested in poker. And scenes involving a British pothead whose mother is a Jackie Collins-style best-seller writer. And Adrienne Shelley, stealing her scenes with a hilarious nasal voice and a personality to match.
“Sleep With Me” is the kind of movie anyone is likely to drift into. The writer-director Quentin Tarantino turns up, for example, as a guest at a party, and launches into a long, detailed, manic explanation of why “Top Gun” is really “the story of a man’s struggle against his own homosexuality.” The more he talks, the more plausible his theory sounds.
The movie ends kind of abruptly. Maybe all six writers wrote for the beginning and the middle, and no one thought to close the story. What we’re left with are bits and pieces, some of them inspired, in a movie that kind of works sometimes, if you approach it in the right mood. The odd thing is, the offhandedness is seductive; if “Sleep With Me” had been tighter and slicker, it might have lost its scattered charms.
Sleep with Me (1994)
Directed by: Rory Kelly
Starring: Craig Sheffer, Eric Stoltz, Meg Tilly, Dean Cameron, Todd Field, Thomas Gibson, Parker Posey, Adrienne Shelly, Susan Traylor, Tegan West, June Lockhart, Vanessa Angel
Screenplay by: Duane Dell’Amico, Roger Hedden, Neal Jimenez, Joe Keenan, Rory Kelly, Michael Steinberg
Production Design by: Randy Eriksen
Cinematography by: Andrzej Sekuła
Film Editing by: David Moritz
Costume Design by: Isis Mussenden
Set Decoration by: Adam Mead Faletti
Art Direction by: J. Michael Gorman
Music by: David Lawrence
MPAA Rating: R for sexuality, language and drug use.
Distributed by: Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Release Date: September 23, 1994
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