MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Sleep With Me’ Is Really a Conventional Love Triangle

For most of its length “Sleep With Me,” directed by first-timer Rory Kelly, offers up maundering set pieces involving its young actors carousing, yelling, arguing. Talking nonstop is a tic they can’t shake.

Is the talk worth listening to? That depends on who is talking and when. The film’s gimmick is that six screenwriters--all friends, each contributing a separate segment--worked on it independently. The result is no more or less of a patchwork than most bigger-budgeted Hollywood films--many of which also have six writers, or more, if you include all the uncredited hands. In fact, the near-seamlessness of the script--credited to Kelly, Duane Dell’Amico, Roger Hedden, Neal Jimenez, Joe Keenan and Michael Steinberg--is somewhat off-putting. With all these supposedly different sensibilities at work, why concoct something that rolls along without a bump?

Fashioned as a new-style love triangle movie, “Sleep With Me” ends up, despite its free-form acting and “modern” attitudes, being rather conventional. It mints the same old familiar romantic cliches for the late-20s, early 30s generation.

Joseph (Eric Stoltz) and his best friend, Frank (Craig Sheffer), have a problem: Joseph’s wife, Sarah (Meg Tilly). Beginning with a casual flirtation on the day before her wedding, Sarah comes on to Frank and drives him to distraction. It turns out he always loved her; she’s flattered, wary, seductive, standoffish. When Frank declares his love for her at a gathering of friends, Joseph turns against both his wife and his friend. Frank spends most of the rest of the movie crashing various parties in order to importune Sarah; most of his circle of friends, who also include a snooty Brit (Thomas Gibson) and a struggling screenwriter (Todd Field), keep their distance too, or else try to foment the fighting. The guys’ weekly poker game degenerates.

The actors are talented and loose-limbed enough to keep the wayward sequences watchable. But there’s precious little character development. Once you get their drift, the scenes begin to pile up rather than develop. There may be a certain dramatic logic to this: We’re probably meant to register how these layabouts fritter away their time and recycle the same peeves. But the effect is like a great big actors’ studio exercise--lots of gnashing and carrying on. And Kelly tries to give it all a forlorn friskiness.

There are some terrific moments, like the funny-hostile scene where a sometime girlfriend of Frank’s, played very well by Vanessa Angel, talks about rebirthing and her love for men; or a party scene where a nonstop gabber played by Quentin Tarantino goes on about the homoerotic subtext of “Top Gun.” (The funniest thing is, he’s right.) “Sleep With Me” keeps you in its whirl while it’s spinning, but there’s not much to savor when it comes to a stop.

* MPAA rating: R, for sexuality, language, drug use. Times guidelines: It includes some marijuana smoking and brief sexual friskiness .

‘Sleep With Me’

Meg Tilly: Sarah

Eric Stoltz: Joseph

Craig Sheffer: Frank

Todd Field: Duane

An August Entertainment presentation, a UA release. Director Rory Kelly. Producers Michael Steinberg, Roger Hedden, Eric Stoltz. Executive producer Joel Castleberg. Screenplay by Duane Dell’Amico, Roger Hedden, Neal Jimenez, Joe Keenan, Rory Kelly, Michael Steinberg. Cinematographer Adrzej Sekula. Editor David Moritz. Costumes Isis Mussenden. Music David Lawrence. Production design Randy Eriksen. Set decorator Adam Mead Faletti. Running time: 1 hour, 41 minutes.

* In limited release at the Goldwyn Pavilion, Pico between Westwood and Overland, (310) 475-0202; Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., (310) 394-9741; and Beverly Center Cineplex, Beverly Boulevard at La Cienega, (310) 652-7760.