Sleeping with the Enemy (1991) * *

Directed by:  Joseph Ruben

Starring:  Julia Roberts, Kevin Anderson, Patrick Bergin, Elizabeth Lawrence

Sleeping with the Enemy begins to step wrong as the plot takes shape.   The first half hour is well done, but then once Roberts' character fakes her death to escape her abusive husband, the movie becomes an ordinary thriller and the husband becomes a standard slasher movie villain.    He transforms into a cliche.   

Roberts plays Laura, a twenty-something wife of rich investment banker Martin (Bergin).  They live in a cold Cape Cod glass house which screams yuppie excess and doesn't seem lived in.  No wonder.   Martin is a control freak who admonishes his wife when the towels aren't lined up just right or something is out of place.   He strikes her and practically keeps her prisoner in her home, except for the occasional parties they go to so he could show her off.     The opening scenes detail a troubled marriage peppered by psychological and physical abuse.   They hold a certain power.   Then, Laura hatches a plan to fake her death in a boat accident and light out for Iowa.   She pulls it off for a while, but soon Martin discovers the plot and tracks her down.  I didn't think the whole "flush the wedding ring down the toilet" idea was a particularly smart one.

Without such missteps, there would be no second or third act, which would have suited me just fine.   But the movie is determined to go where it leads and we follow Laura to Iowa where she lives near her ailing mother whom Laura told Martin was dead.     Her neighbor Ben (Anderson) is sweet, thoughtful, understanding, and dull as dishwater.   She resists his advances and makes it clear She Has A Troubled Past, but soon she relents and hooks up with him.   Their relationship is a prime example of two people coming together because the script says they should right about now.  There is no juice whatsoever.    Ben is simply too syrupy sweet and Laura simply too standoffish to make this a convincing love story.

As Ben and Laura dance to Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl" playing on the soundtrack, Martin walks around in a long, black, conspicuous trench coat, a Kevin Kline mustache, and a crazed stare which should trigger anyone who comes in contact with him to dial 911.    He transforms into an over-the-top villain, which belies the earlier. more powerful scenes in which Martin is portrayed as person of control and precision.    He was a person of slow-burning fury whose rage lashes out after attempts at cold civility fail.     He keeps his rage measured, but in the later scenes he all but froths at the mouth.  Bergin's performance is good here, even when his characters flies off the rails and becomes an all-out stalker/killer. 

Roberts earns our sympathy as the battered wife, but when she moves to Iowa she is cold and distant perhaps due to fear of discovery or because she has symptoms of PTSD.     She is less interesting than in the earlier scenes, but by then the focus of the film clearly shifts to becoming a slasher thriller and nothing more.     It is a shame.    Sleeping with the Enemy could have been a masterpiece if it maintained the tone of the earlier story and saw it through to an unblinking, maybe even inevitable conclusion.     But, perhaps due to commercial considerations and perhaps because audiences want to see the bastard get his in the end, Sleeping with the Enemy shifts gears just when it really started to get interesting.