Only Men Sleep with Dictionaries...

This movie stars Hugh Darcy as John Truscott, Bob Hoskins as Bullard, and Jessica Alba as Malaysian Eban tribal member Selima. I have not seen "Blackhawk Down" from which Hugh Darcy came, so I knew nothing of him, and Jessica Alba is a cross in my memory between the lead in Dark Angel and the girl who went to prom as Disco Barbie in "Never Been Kissed." So I wasn't exactly expecting a lot there. The only person from this film that I really knew of beforehand was Bob Hoskins, with whom I am always thoroughly impressed anyway, and will always be, even if he was portraying a cross dressing Nazi hooker employed to dress up as a rhino at children's birthday parties. I just knew with certainty that this one had to be a romantic period drama from the cover, which therefore hypnotized me into renting it (as I somehow always do,) and I am really glad that I did.

You will be surprised just how much this movie does not suck. Do NOT go into this film with any expectations of either excellence or rancor, and then you just cannot be disappointed. This film is great actually; I really liked it a lot more than many in this genre that I've watched this year (Example- "The Golden Bowl" which was so horrible that if I had for some strange reason an Uma Thurman poster in my possession, I would've burnt it in the street in an angry protest just because of the two hours of my life that I will never get back that it took to watch that awful awful film.)

So on to "The Sleeping Dictionary" ...

The premise goes like this: its 1933 and England is still very much a controlling force in a lot of the world. The graduating cadet officers of military colleges are required to go head up tribes in far away lands and "civilize" the people there. Sounds like a winner of an idea right? Sending young, inexperienced, proper little unarmed English boys into the deep dark jungle? :)

So Truscott shows up in Sarawak, which couldn't be more in the middle of nowhere, but hey it has a river and some people. He is greeted by Bullard, who laughs at him for being more than a little "green." He gets to meet a few of the locals on his first night, gets blitzed on a LOT of rice wine, tells a bad poem badly, dances with a man and then passes out on a bridge. Lovely welcome aye?

The next day Truscott is informed if he is going to run the people, then he will have to learn the language and quickly. Makes sense right? But that is where the neutrality of this film ends. Everything from here on out makes it most obviously written by a man. Which doesn't make it bad or anything, I am not being sexist here, it's just there is no way a woman would think up the concept behind this film - this in entirely a man's baby (Guy Jenkin actually is the man who wrote and directed this... *giggles* to the fact that his name is actually GUY.)

So, Bullard and the head longhouse leader (who is like the Eban tribe's king sort of) come to Truscott with the beautiful Selima so they may inform Truscott that she is going to be his "Sleeping Dictionary." What a sleeping dictionary does is to "perform wifely duties in the bedroom" while helping to teach the young officers the native language. That is what I meant by "only a man could dream this one up." But apparently Bullard says it's worked for centuries, so hey, who's to throw a wrench in the system now? Even though the scenery was beautiful at this point, I was rolling my eyes to think of what was to come. It actually got better, not worse.

As far as for the wrench in the program, well, that honor would be handed to Truscott, who doesn't believe in premarital sex and stands by the "spirits of his country" and at first he casts Selima away (which makes for some interesting scenes of Alba taking out her frustration on him in the small amount of English she does know.) But slowly Truscott begins to have feelings for her and eventually she becomes a little more "sleep" than "dictionary", much to the dismay of basically everyone, because no one approves of an English gentleman being in love with a "primal tribal head huntress".

The movie changes from that of romance to that of survival and a fight to keep hold on to what becomes a very deep love. It isn't helping that Bullard's evil scheming and quite scorned wife (played by Brenda Blethyn) keeps shoving her proper and totally annoying anal daughter Cecil (played by Emily Mortimer) down Truscott's throat every five minutes.

Eventually fate forces the two lovers apart but fear not because where there is a will, there is a cliché... I mean, a way, even when fate keeps kicking them in the head with a giant golf shoe time and again.

The ending is really very good, considering I like happy ones usually. I am not into the "Everyone you like is dead, Romeo and Juliet, go home and cry about it" endings. I feel like usually, unless the subject calls for it, if I’m going to see a "romance" then I want a happy ending, since life isn't always that way, the fantasy of a movie should at least attempt it.

Anyway, this movie is wonderfully acted by pretty much everyone. Jessica Alba's talented performance showed a lot more than "a pretty face for the sake of a pretty body" than anyone could've expected, and everybody seems so real in their interactions and basically just in the whole film. The chemistry between Darcy and Alba was riveting. And you have so much drama to chew here: there's the cute romantic guy, the exotic and mysterious girl, the always responsible even when it hurts old man, the evil conniving old hag bag, and even a weasely (I know that isn‘t a word but if it were, it would fit perfectly here) sarcastic psycho who somehow always has a gun and a sinister look on his face with horrible thoughts to match!

The tropical rain forest setting is beautiful to look at and they really made use of it well as the backdrop to all the drama going on. The music is even good and fits like a glove, reminding me a lot of the movie "The Medicine Man" with Sean Connery. In fact, this movie has a lot of the kind of feel that movie had (imo,) only with much more developed romance in the story.

Let's see, what else: it's not too long, it's not too short, the dialogue is quite good, you'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll sigh and roll your eye...s, yes, this movie has a lot in it, so give yourself a bit to take it all in. Might want to watch it twice at first to get all of it down. Very involving.

PS- sorry, no gigantic explosions or creatures from the hot orange stinky lagoon or any of that, hate to disappoint. (unless you consider Bullard's wife in the film. LOL)