While You Were Sleeping. - movie reviews

LET'S SPEAK about an exceptionally charming young actress, Sandra Bullock. It is my wife who, during a brief stint as a theatrical casting director, gave Miss Bullock her stage breakthrough, having picked her picture from among those of many other applicants. It was a terrible play, but I was able to give Sandra Bullock what I think was her first major rave. When she moved on to the movies, I was disappointed in her first appearance -- in a dreadful American remake of the great Dutch thriller The Vanishing. But after that, everything she did was solid: you must, at the very least, have seen her driving that bus in Speed. In While You Were Sleeping she has an even tougher assignment: to carry the entire movie. And she does.

While You Were Sleeping is a mediocre concoction -- indeed, not to put too fine a point on it, quite preposterous. The first film written by Daniel G. Sullivan and Fredric Lebow, it was directed by John Turteltaub, whose Cool Runnings I either missed or have totally forgotten. It concerns Lucy, an orphan working as a token clerk in a booth on the Chicago El. This is already absurd. In all my many years of riding subways -- not, to be sure, in Chicago, but so what? -- I have never seen a token booth inhabited by anyone remotely like Miss Bullock. I realize that romantic screwball comedies embellish things, but a young woman with half the charm, looks, and savoir faire of this Lucy ought to be running for President.

Daily, Lucy watches a handsome young man catch the train at her station as she spins fantasies about him. One day he is pushed onto the tracks, and Lucy rescues him from an oncoming train. He ends up in the hospital in a coma, and through an elaborate misunderstanding, the comatose man's family astonishedly accepts Lucy as his fiancee. He is Peter, a lawyer; his father and his brother, Jack, run Callaghan & Son, a company that disposes of dead people's furniture, a business also romanticized by the movie insofar as it is addressed at all. Because Lucy craves a family, she lets herself be sucked deeper and deeper into the role of Peter's fiancee, even though by now she has fallen in love with Jack and he with her, though, as always in such films, neither can guess the other's feelings. To complicate matters, Lucy's oafish landlord has the hots for her, and Jack keeps coming upon them in situations misleadingly suggesting a relationship -- perhaps the hoariest wheeze of them all.

If you think that this sounds shopworn and phony, you are absolutely right, and it is only the half of it. The film cheats in a number of ways. Lucy lives in a very nice apartment in a very nice part of town -- on what? Her best female friend is a black colleague; her best male friend is a prosperous, middle-aged black businessman, with whom she regularly shares lunch hours at an outdoor hot-dog stand, situated, naturally, in Chicago's most photogenic spot. Okay for her to do so, but the businessman would be more likely to put on the dog than to stuff in a hot dog. The best friend of the Callaghans, without whom they never seem to venture abroad, is Sol, Peter's godfather and a Jew. Thus do we learn what fine liberals both Lucy and the Callaghans are. There is something facile even about the way both Christmas and New Year's Eve are schematically drawn into the story. Especially suspect is a scene where Jack walks Lucy home and they keep slipping on the ice for minutes on end into each other's arms. Alone, at other times, neither of them slips so much as once.

Whimsical weirdness escalates: a fellow lawyer and sports opponent of Peter's improbably confesses to Lucy to having accidentally poked out one of Peter's testicles with a pen in his trouser pocket during one of their games; this information, unknown to all the other Callaghans, proves that Lucy really is Peter's fiancee. "Look at it on the bright side," says one of the Callaghans, "he's got more room in his jockey shorts." Asked what her father was like, Lucy replies, "He was a lot like me: dark hair, flat chest, and stuff." That one of the writers is Catholic, the other Jewish, guarantees evenly divided Catholic and Jewish jokes and adds to the aura of opportunism.

The mentality, morality, and sensibility of the film are emphatically retrograde. Peter Gallagher sleeps well as Peter, and is properly dazed when he wakes up affianced, especially as he already has another fiancee, a married woman -- yes, that's the humor of it! Bill Pullman, for the first time in a wholly sympathetic role, is a personable but somewhat uncharismatic Jack; such fine actors as Glynis Johns and Peter Boyle are wasted on lesser Callaghans. Jack Warden doesn't quite make it as a sweet Sol: something about his slitty eyes and crinkly face demands less lovable roles.

But, making up for everything, there is Sandra Bullock. She has the same warmth and vulnerability as another fine young actress, Marisa Tomei, but she is more feminine, less tomboyish. Though she is never less than adorable, she is not a classic beauty; rather, it is an inner loveliness that at moments inundates her face, and you can actually watch fresh young girlish looks suddenly ripen into womanly transcendence. It finally doesn't matter how good a movie While You Were Sleeping is; it is a Sandra Bullock movie, exuding her special grace.

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