Goldthwait lingers on moments of John and Amy behaving like a recognizable couple rather than as one-note devices to advance the plot, and the camerawork is unobtrusive, yet carefully crafted, a cut above the typical point and shoot style most comedies employ. It’s tricky territory, and in Goldthwait’s film there is much pleasure to be found watching the protagonists squirm and contort around the slippery poles of what they want to say, what they want to do, what they have done, and, most importantly, what they think the other person wants them to say or do. While we should accept each other for who we are-so goes the refrain-sometimes, in some things, maybe it’s better not to reveal all. That she feels this need in the first place can be read as an indictment of our tell-all culture, where honesty has become confused with shameless exhibitionism. Instead, Amy and John are incredibly average young people (he wants to be a writer, she’s a kindergarten teacher), one of whom did something that even the most kinkiest among us might find disconcerting, did not get off on it, and now believes it to be dishonest to not reveal it to her man. Refreshingly, Sleeping Dogs Lie is not about kinky freaks who must learn to love themselves. They are both as bourgeois and vanilla as can be, and their sexual frankness is both uncomfortable and oddly endearing. When John, the fiancé, talks about jacking off for the first time, he is as giggly as a schoolboy. When Amy (Melinda Page Hamilton), spices up a bedroom confession with a made-up sexual liaison with her close female friend in order to avoid telling her fiancé of her canine indiscretion, she believes (correctly) that it will turn him on instead of freak him out. What follows is a pleasantly low-key, almost naturalistic comedy seemingly designed to thwart expectations.
And, yes, the film hinges upon what happens after a girl gives her dog head, but that carnal act is dispensed of quickly and relatively tastefully in the first few minutes of the film. Sleeping Dogs Lie may have been directed by bizarro Eighties comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, but it is less about funny voices than the small human damage inflicted by actions and words we wish we could take back. And it’s likely the audience who does go to Sleeping Dogs Lie will expect a gross-out in the Farrelly Brothers vein, only to be sorely disappointed by what’s essentially an oddly straightforward romantic comedy. Sadder still is that the premise is probably too icky by a wide shot for the people who would most respond to the movie. That there is more emotional honesty about relationships in Sleeping Dogs Lie, a film that features a canine blowjob as its central plot point, than in any other American romantic comedy of recent memory is a sad state of affairs. Bobcat Goldthwait, U.S., Roadside Attractions