SLEEP WITH ME

SLEEP WITH ME (Directed by Rory Kelly. Starring Eric Stoltz, Meg Tilly, Craig Sheffer)

Or one wedding and six dinners. A twenty-something chronicle of a disintegrating marriage, schematically structured by six different script-writers around six different parties, Sleep With Me is almost inevitably inconsistent in tone. Some of the parties look like they were worth attending, filled with intriguing characters and whiplash dialogue, others are about as thrilling as a tea party at a vicarage. Quentin Tarantino makes a bid for cultural ubiquity by turning up as a movie bore, rattling off his bizarrely convincing theory that Top Gun was actually a gay movie, while Hal Hartley regular Adrienne Shelley does her scene stealing non-verbally, simply squealing deliciously as the gooseberry caught between would be adulterers.

Unfortunately, these and other guests are considerably more interesting than the self-absorbed trio at the movie’s centre. Eric Stoltz, who seems to be in every other independent movie these days (including Tarantino’s), attempts to break out of his usual sleepy persona by getting a trifle passionate as his best friend Frank (Craig Sheffer) tries to seduce his wife (Meg Tilly) but even at his most extreme he barely breaks a sweat. At times, particularly in an awful, overlong scene of camcorder navel gazing, it is hard to tell if the movie is satirising Generation Me, or celebrating it. Occasionally so laidback in its Californian trimmings that, despite the plea of the title, it is the audience that is in danger of going to sleep, Sleep With Me is redeemed by moments of real wit and minor characters of genuine invention. Still, given that Tarantino’s speech is the liveliest one in the movie, perhaps they should have sacked the six screenwriters and got him to supply the dialogue.