Sleep with Me (1994)
A love story without sentiment
15 February 2002
Spanning the time from the marriage of Joe to Sarah through the various stages of their marriage breakdown, this follows Joe's best friend Frank as he tries to hold his life together despite his love for Sarah.

Written by about six different writers, each doing a different section. It all plays like the opposite of Friends. The group of friends are less polished and in some respects seem more realistic, however in other scenes their activities seem very far fetched and outlandish to be real. However at the end of the day the central strand of the story around Joe, Sarah and Frank is good and interesting. The only problem with this strand is that more time is spent watching Joe and Sarah experience problems rather than falling in love - this makes their relationship hard to support or believe in. Whereas in contrast Frank's longing for Sarah is shown to be developing and it makes it easier to support this.

The film's main weakness is that the supporting characters are little more than fonts for witty banter and never convince as real people. Stoltz is actually quite good, however Sheffer is allowed more audience sympathy and comes off better. Tilly is excellent (and is very beautiful) she brings the torn wife to life. Of the rest of the cast there are plenty of indie faces, but the real stealer is Tarantino in a short cameo as a party guest talking animatedly about Top Gun's homoerotic sub text.

Overall it is very rough around the edges and at times feels a little bitty, however it is refreshingly free of mushy sentiment and is quite funny.
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