Sleepless in Seattle

Sleepless in Seattle is an exceptionally tender portrayal of a love story. While fate plays a significant role, the romantic story of the male and female leads is deeply moving, like a breeze filled with Comrades: Almost a Love Story that brings them together.

It's a shame Sleepless in Seattle droops down into the slums of a typical romantic comedy formula somewhere in the second act, because up to that point it had been a surprisingly delicate, open-hearted perspective on the mourning process. Tom Hanks, who effectively flexes his solemn-face muscles for most of the picture, is the titular "Sleepless," a widower who doesn't believe in love after loss and can't close his eyes without getting tangled in painful memories. When his son convinces him to sit in on a call to a self-help radio program, he gains fame among the desperate middle-aged set. Mixed in among that pack is a not-quite-ready-to-be-married Meg Ryan, who obsesses over him to a worrying degree. It would be curious to see this play out with the roles reversed today - would it be dubbed a timeless romance or a dark dose of suspense? I was on the hook for that first act, but when the tone shifted to allow for more punchlines, it lost its way and bucked me into the dirt. Mildly funny soap opera material for the most part, it's disappointing Hanks and Ryan didn't have a chance to revisit the chemistry they'd first sparked in Joe Versus the Volcano - the two charismatic stars only share the screen for a few moments.

Quirky romantic dramedy uses its star cast well. While the screenplay is decent I found the leaps in logic from the plot to be a little too much! Still it was a fun watch in 2023.

Decent romance movie. It was kind of cheesy in a lot of parts in the movie. Overall though not bad. It's a classic a deserves to be seen at least once.

Romantic comedies are very difficult to get right. This “old classic” signed Nora Ephron is a good example of everything that can go wrong. Built on the success of “When Harry met Sally”, we have cute heroine Meg Ryan playing one of her romantic leads roles, inclusive of tics and weirdness that were her trademark. She could easily be a slightly older version of Sally, with a worse haircut. This time, her character is called Annie and she lives in Baltimore. Annie is engaged to Walter, whose main defect is being dull. This must be a terrible crime in Ephron’s book, since Walter is treated with zero respect. One night, Annie listens to Sam’s phone call to a radio station. Sam is a young widower, living in Seattle with his son Jonah. Just listening to his story Annie fells for him. Many criticized this idea of falling in love, which however is not the worst point of the movie. People fall in love for lots of different reasons, so I could buy Annie falling for Sam and trying to meet him. What I do not buy is the artificiality of all the events presented after that. Annie is a journalist and manages to be sent to Seattle to meet Sam, but somehow manages not to do so, even if she sees him twice (and he sees her too, managing to fell in love at “first sight”). They do not exchange words, even if she could have waited for him and introduced herself in a normal way. But that would have been way too dull for Ephron. Then there is a letter which makes unbearable Jonah instantly like Annie. Jonah tries to push Sam to meet Annie on top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day. This is contrivance at the highest level, built in the script together with many references to the movie “An affair to remember”. Since neither Sam nor Annie live in New York, this “romantic” meeting on Valentine’s is supposed to prove that “love at first sight” does exist and can even be the basis for a long lasting relationship….. or whatever. What I got instead, is an overlong, unfunny movie where the two leads meet only at the end, which is certainly not the way I like onscreen romances to go.