MOVIE REVIEWS : ‘While You Were Sleeping’ a Sugary Romantic Comedy

The amiable, methodically inoffensive “While You Were Sleeping” opens with a woman’s honey-colored childhood memories of her deceased father but, even when the memories have faded into the present day, the honey continues to flow. It’s a movie about the warm feeling you get when you belong to a family, and, throughout, the thermostat is turned up high.

Lucy (Sandra Bullock), who lives by herself, plus cat, has no family of her own. She works inside a token booth for the Chicago Transit Authority and moons over a handsome yuppie-ish exec, Peter Callaghan (Peter Gallagher), who shows up every day for the El. When he’s rousted by muggers and left sprawling and unconscious on the tracks in the path of an oncoming train, Lucy rolls him to safety.

Through a set of farcical complications in the hospital room, Lucy is mistaken for the comatose Peter’s fiancee by his sprawling extended family, including his aptly named father, Ox (Peter Boyle), mother Midge (Micole Mercurio), Midge’s mother Elsie (Glynis Johns) and long-term family friend Saul (Jack Warden). Because she has a tremendous ache to be a part of a chummy, contentious clan like the Callaghans, Lucy goes along with the ruse.

She claims she doesn’t want to shatter the Callaghans’ illusions--she wants to bolster their fantasy that Peter, who broke away from the family, was ready to return to the fold with a caring cuddlebunny like her. But it’s clear she doesn’t want to shatter her own fantasy either. The conflict comes when Lucy and Peter’s brother, Jack (Bill Pullman), begin to take a mutually warming interest in each other. And what will happen when Peter snaps out of his coma?

The black comic possibilities in this material are sugared and softened. “While You Were Sleeping” is about as disturbing as a sitcom. It’s punchy and “heartfelt” and almost frighteningly in sync with its audience. It doesn’t challenge, it coddles. Our oohs and aahs are elicited right down to the millisecond. Jon Turtletaub, who directed from a script by Daniel G. Sullivan and Frederic Lebow, was responsible for “3 Ninjas” and “Cool Runnings,” the top-grossing Disney live-action movies for 1992 and 1993, respectively, and he may make it three in a row here. He’s become a real smoothie. In this movie about the vagaries of love, nothing is left to chance.

The people in “While You Were Sleeping” seem a bit too aware of how bumptiously cute they are. Right down to Lucy’s lecherous neighbor Joe Jr. (Michael Rispoli), just about everybody in the movie has all the mettle of a Muppet. It’s an adult comedy-romance with a kiddie core. Lucy’s longing is de-sexualized; she’s essentially the same child we saw in those honeyed flashbacks, except now she has an adult’s sense of aloneness. She’s the heart of the movie and heart is all she is allowed to display.

Bullock is a genuinely engaging performer, which at least gives the treacle some minty freshness. Her scenes with Pullman are amiable approach-avoidance duets that really convince you something is going on between them. Like Marisa Tomei, Bullock has a sky-high likability factor with audiences. She can draw us into her spunky loneliness--you want to see her smile. But she’s been encouraged here to be a bit too floppy and winsome and touching--she and everybody else--and it’s unnecessary. Bullock already is charming. She doesn’t need to get all Chaplin-esque for us.

With a movie as sleek and self-satisfied as “While You Were Sleeping,” with every audience-response button pushed with precision, even the cliches and tired routines may seem fresh for people who haven’t seen many movies. There’s a subplot involving “selective amnesia” that may be a subtle in-joke here: It helps in enjoying this film if you repress all the other times you’ve seen two women vying for the same man spin through revolving doors, or listened to comfy Capra-esque Christmas chats about the value of togetherness.

But perhaps the filmmakers are after the opposite effect, too--not selective amnesia but total recall. As they did with Lucy, they want audiences to evoke their own sugared memories--their own movie memories. They’re true Hollywood alchemists. They turn pap into honey.

* MPAA rating: PG, for some language. Times guidelines: It includes a mugging and a near-miss train accident .

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‘While You Were Sleeping’

Sandra Bullock: Lucy Bill Pullman: Jack Peter Boyle: Ox Jack Warden: Saul A Hollywood Pictures presentation. Director Jon Turtletaub. Producers Joe Roth and Roger Birnbaum. Executive producers Arthur Sarkissian and Steve Barron. Screenplay by Daniel G. Sullivan & Frederic Lebow. Cinematographer Phedon Papamichael. Editor Bruce Green. Costumes Betsy Cox. Music Randy Edelman. Production design Garreth Stover. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes.

* In general release throughout Southern California.