Sleepless in Seattle
Nora Ephron putting together Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in this movie is the main reason it works. They have an innate chemistry together, which was evident after “Joe Versus the Volcano,” that keeps us from thinking about the fact that this is essentially a romantic comedy-drama built on Meg Ryan’s character being a stalker. But it also comes down to the fact that Ephron is a writer, and filmmaker, who is capable of writing real individuals rather than simply archetypes. For me, “You’ve Got Mail” is the better example of the alchemy between these three, but “Sleepless in Seattle” remains a charmer.
My mother started rewatching this film a couple of years ago, and it had been a while since I had seen it. There’s a melancholy to the beginning, where we see Hanks’s Sam and Ross Malinger as Jonah at Sam’s wife’s grave after she has died from cancer. We never see her except in brief flashbacks, but her loss is felt throughout. The catalyst for the plot is when Jonah calls in to a radio psychiatrist because he feels his dad needs to move on. Ryan’s Annie is listening in Baltimore; she’s on the way home after announcing her engagement to Walter (Bill Pullman), and you can feel an instant connection she has with Sam, which is will derail all of her plans.
This past year, “Babylon” did a lot of referencing of “Singin’ in the Rain” as it told its story of Old Hollywood, how stardom is fleeting, and how time sometimes makes jokes of what felt serious at the time. I didn’t think it accomplished its goals, personally, because so much of the film itself was hollow emotionally. I bring that up because, rewatching “Sleepless in Seattle,” this is another distinct example of that, as Ephron and her co-writers, David S. Ward and Jeff Arch, do some very direct referencing to “An Affair to Remember” with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Like with “Babylon,” “Sleepless” even directly lifts the bones of its climax from the earlier film, but the reason I feel this worked and “Babylon” didn’t is because it didn’t trade off of the emotions of the early film for its emotional climax. Yes, the idea of the Empire State Building climax is lifted from “Affair to Remember,” but Ephron is using the film in multiple ways, not only as a way of commenting on the differences between “chick flicks” and what makes men cry in the famous scene where Sam is having dinner with two of his friends (Victor Garber and Rita Wilson), but also to play off of the idea that sometimes, narratives don’t have to explain why a connection is meant to be so long as the characters believe it is, and the actors make us buy it. That’s why we don’t really think about how Annie is kind of stalker-like; throughout the film, we’ve seen how much she believes in magic and fate, and her hearing Sam and Jonah on the radio feels like that. And when she goes to Seattle to spy on them, the times when one sees the other all play to the necessary awareness of whom the other is to make that finale work. And every time, it does. That’s the work of a storyteller who understands why one film’s connection to a different story works.
While Hanks had certainly become a big name with “Splash” and “A League of Their Own” and “Big,” the 1-2 punch of this and “Philadelphia” is what turned him into one of the biggest stars of all-time, and I love how Ephron challenges him in both this and “You’ve Got Mail” to play a character who is not always likeable, but whom we support every step of the way. Sam is really struggling, and the dynamic he has with Jonah is so important to this film working. Hanks has to sell him talking about his wife over the radio to get Ryan to have her life turned upside down by him. He does, and I like how he never really buys into Jonah’s ideas of what’s best for him- and who’s best for him- until that final moment. It is absolutely perfect, and every time I watch the movie, I’m reminded why he and Ryan were one of the best pairs in recent memory, and that Nora Ephron- at her best- was a wonderful talent.
