BEAUTIFUL DREAMER

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

At the center of the fairy tale a prince (Peter Gallagher), not the customary princess, lies sleeping. He's in a coma, having been saved from death by a pertly pining princess (Sandra Bullock) who, loving him from afar, is unaware that he's really a toad in disguise.

And that's just the beginning of the comic confusion. For his family, clustered around his bedside, get the impression that she's his fianca and, being nice, warm people, take her into their circle. She doesn't have the heart to tell them the truth: that she's just a girl who works in a change booth on the Chicago El who never had the gumption to speak to him when he bought his tokens from her every morning. Luckily, the family harbors an authentic prince, Peter's brother Jack (Bill Pullman), whose initial suspicion of Lucy is, of course, the harbinger of true love.

So everything comes out all right in the end, which is not exactly startling. What is startling is how well While You Were Sleeping recaptures the true spirit of the best kind of modern fairy tale--classic romantic comedy. This is something Hollywood has been trying hard, and failing miserably, to revive in recent years. Though this kind of comedy occasionally skitters toward the screwball-mistaken identity, preposterous coincidence, even the odd pratfall are all judiciously permitted--it's really a grownup form. It needs smart dialogue and plausibly eccentric characters (Michael Rispoli contributes a beaut to this one, as an inappropriate suitor to Lucy, and such worthy veterans as Jack Warden and Glynis Johns give good comic weight too). Above all, it requires honorable sentiment--not to be confused with dishonest sentimentality.

All this While You Were Sleeping has. But its most attractive quality is its ease. The script by Daniel G. Sullivan and Fred Lebow wears its wit casually, and the director, Jon Turteltaub, is serenely confident of it, his actors and his audience. He lets scenes develop and characters--especially Bullock's alert and tender Lucy--emerge at their own unforced pace. How nice it is to come out of a mainstream American movie feeling that you've been treated as an adult. And how rare.