by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Saturday night Lifetime showed a movie from 1991 that
became quite famous but which had somehow eluded me before: Sleeping with
the Enemy, a domestic violence drama
featuring Julia Roberts as an abused wife in Cape Cod, Massachusetts (though
the location work was done in Abbeville, South Carolina, and Julia Roberts told
reporters she couldn’t get out of there fast enough because she had a hard time
dealing with the racist attitudes of the locals) and Patrick Bergin as Martin
Burney, the husband who abuses her. This gets trotted out on Lifetime now and
again because it’s sort of the ur-Lifetime
movie, even though it was a theatrical release from a major studio (20th
Century-Fox) and Roberts got a $1 million guarantee for appearing in it (at 23,
the youngest woman ever to get that much of a guarantee for one film), and in
its “pussy in peril” plot line — Roberts’ character, Laura Williams Burney,
steals a bankroll and flees halfway across the country, ending up in Cedar
Falls, Iowa, where she finds a rental house, a job at the local university
library and the love of a drama teacher, Ben Woodward (Kevin Anderson) —
certainly helped set the template for Lifetime’s set of clichés.
The film
borrowed its title (it was based on a 1987 novel of the same name by Nancy
Price; the screenplay was by Ronald Bass and the director was Joseph Rubin),
ironically, from a slogan used by Lesbian separatist feminists in the 1970’s to
describe women who called themselves feminists but still had sex with men.
Another of their slogans was, “Feminism is the theory; Lesbianism is the
practice,” which led a few straight women feminists to try to re-invent
themselves as Lesbians, with the same dismal results suffered by Gay and
Lesbian people who try, for reasons of social acceptance, religious belief or
whatever, to reinvent themselves as heterosexual. Sleeping with the
Enemy is important probably more for its
trailblazing nature than its actual merits as a film — in the latter it’s a
frustrating example of the good movie that could have been even better — it was
an important milestone in the growing social awareness that domestic violence
was a problem and that the most perfect-looking, seemingly idyllic
relationships could really be tyrannical and abusive behind closed doors. The scene
early on in which Patrick Bergin gives Julia Roberts a back-handed slap with
such force he literally knocks her down still makes an impact — it’s the only
time we see him hit her, but it’s the only time we need to. We get the point
that Laura lives in continual terror — especially since Martin is not only
physically abusive, he’s also got a huge case of OCD that leads him to insist
that the hand towels in the bathroom be laid and folded out exactly evenly and
the canned food in their cupboard all be lined up with military precision.
She
finally gets her chance to get away when, despite her fear of water, Martin
orders her to accompany him on an evening sail on a boat owned by a local man
whom he had earlier accused Laura of flirting with. A storm conveniently blows
up and Laura is washed overboard and presumed drowned. Martin stages a funeral
service for her, complete with his own smarmy remarks on how much he misses
her, but of course she’s not dead: she’s stolen a bankroll and used it to flee
to Iowa, where she settles in Cedar Falls and rents a home. (One imdb.com
“goofs” contributor wrongly called the filmmakers out on this, saying that she
wouldn’t have had enough money to buy a home even in relatively cheap
small-town Iowa, but the dialogue makes clear she’s only renting it, and we do get the impression she had enough cash on her to do that.) She uses
the name “Sarah Waters” and meets Ben, whose attentions to her at first seem so
creepy that a 2018 viewer will wonder if he, too, is going to abuse her — a
situation which would have made Sleeping with the Enemy a more interesting movie than it is, but in 1991 the
filmmakers were already being daring enough just to acknowledge the existence
of one abusive partner for the
heroine and audiences wouldn’t have believed that Julia Roberts, of all people,
could have encountered two of
them. It soon develops that we’re supposed to believe he’s the nice guy who’s
going to redeem her from the abuse she suffered from bad-guy Martin — who
eventually realizes she’s still alive, hires private investigators to track her
down, and finally traces Laura’s mother Chloe (Elizabeth Lawrence) to a nursing
home and, by impersonating a cop, tricks Chloe into revealing Laura’s
whereabouts. Earlier we’ve seen Laura herself donning one of the least
convincing female-to-male drag disguises in movie history to visit her mom —
her moustache in particular is so risible that when she stops on the way out to
drink from the facility’s water fountain, I was expecting her to do the old
Keaton gag of having it wash off in the water. (Isn’t anybody else ever going to do FTM on film as well as
Katharine Hepburn in the 1935 film Sylvia Scarlett?)
Eventually Martin traces Laura a.k.a. Susan to
Cedar Falls and there’s a big confrontation scene in which he threatens to kill
her on the if-I-can’t-have-you-no-one-can principle, but she manages to turn
the tables and kill him (just
like innumerable Lifetime heroines after her!). There are some nice bits,
including the one in which Martin, having heard that his wife’s new inamoratus is a drama teacher but not knowing which one,
ambushes one of them in his car and is told by the drama teacher that he can’t be involved with Martin’s wife since he’s Gay and
lives with a man. (I joked that Martin would have to work through all six of
the school’s drama teachers to find the one who was straight.) But Martin makes
the same too-fast transition from comprehensible villainy to almost
supernatural evil many subsequent Lifetime villains have, and the film is also
hampered by Julia Roberts’ severe limitations as an actress. She can’t do much
more than look mildly annoyed by Martin’s murderous intentions (which he’s
signaled by rearranging her bath towels and canned foods in the order he
insisted on back when they still lived together) and turn her doe eyes at the
camera in a silent plea for our sympathy. Sleeping with the Enemy was a ground-breaking film in its day, and it holds
up as an exposé of domestic violence among the rich and powerful, but it’s
oddly dated simply because as awareness of the issue has grown, so has the
range of possibilities available to filmmakers and other artists to explore it.
