Review

Sleepless in Seattle

Released: 1993
Director: Nora Ephron
Starring: Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks

Grade: B

How do you write a romantic comedy in which the central couple don’t meet until the last five minutes of the movie? The answer is, you don’t. Nora Ephron’s 1993 Sleepless in Seattle isn’t really a romantic comedy so much as it’s a love letter to the rom com genre.

There’s a voyeuristic thread that runs through Sleepless in Seattle. Annie (Meg Ryan) becomes infatuated with Sam (Tom Hanks) after hearing him wax poetically on the radio about his recently deceased wife. Annie and Sam are two people on opposite sides of the country who are sleepwalking through life. Sam is trying his best to raise his eight-year-old son and get through each day without his wife at his side. Annie is trying to pretend that her engagement to milquetoast Walter (Bill Pullman) isn’t lacking in romance. Their wake-up call comes in the form of a call-in radio program. Sam verbalizes, perhaps for the first time, how truly difficult it is for him to survive without his wife. Annie, alone in her car, hears Sam talk about a kind of love she’s never really known with Walter. 

Sleepless in Seattle is oddly structured. For most of the film we’re watching Meg Ryan stalk Tom Hanks as he goes about living his life mostly unaware of her. Her storyline is entirely dependent on him, while his storyline centers around his son. From a narrative point of view, it makes the movie feels slightly unbalanced. From an allegorical point of view, it makes perfect sense. I see Annie not so much as a character, but as the personification of the rom com audience. She becomes invested in a stranger, just as the rom com audience becomes invested in fictional characters. She’s smart enough to recognize that the radio host is manipulating Sam to get a poignant sound bite (just as the rom com audience might recognize the manipulative tricks of a movie), but she gets sucked in any way. Annie goes so far as to hire a Private Investigator to learn more about Sam, and at one point she flies out to Seattle in hopes of meeting him. It sounds a bit crazy, but how many of us have looked into interviews and paparazzi photos of our favorite actors, yearning to learn a little more about the people we are love onscreen? It’s certainly not the same thing as stalking someone in real life (hopefully no one has done that to their favorite actor), but Annie’s character isn’t necessarily meant to be realistic. She’s a stand in for the viewers who love the magic of a good story. Only in her case, her story is flesh and blood, not celluloid.

In another ode to the rom com genre, writer/director Nora Ephron conceives of her film as an homage to the 1957 classic romantic melodrama, An Affair to Remember. Thanks to a dad who instilled me with a solid education in classic films, I’m familiar with An Affair to Remember, but you don’t really need to know the specifics of that film to get Ephron’s point. People love movies and conceptualize their real lives based around fictional ones. As Rosie O’Donnell’s character points out to Annie, “You want to be in love in a movie. You don’t want to be in love.” Annie asks Sam to meet her on top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day, just as Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr agree to do in An Affair to Remember. Fiction becomes reality to characters in a fictional world. It’s all a bit meta, but it works because the desire to make real life like something in a movie is so universal. In the ultimate bit of meta commentary, Annie laments,  “Men just don’t understand this movie,” as she sobs her way through the umpteenth viewing of An Affair to Remember. It’s a statement that could be applied to most Nora Ephron movies and most rom coms in general.


I’ve written about Nora Ephron’s work before in my review of When Harry Met Sally, one of her early screenplays. Sleepless in Seattle marks Ephron’s directorial debut and she rises to the challenge with a nice sense of style that enhances rather than overwhelms the story she’s telling. Although they remain physically separated for most of the movie, Ephron links Sam and Annie visually through parallel shots of their lives. Ephron also creates a unique visual landscape for each of the cities featured in the film- Chicago, Baltimore, Seattle, and New York. There’s a particularly beautiful aerial shot of Sam and his son Jonah standing in a graveyard that moves to reveal the Chicago skyline behind them. Smart use of location shots help ground the movie in the reality of our world and captures some of the magical rhythm of city living.

In general, early Nora Ephron movies have a lovely, lived-in quality that feels very different than the overproduced, polished rom coms of today. There’s a lot of attention to detail- Jonah sleeps in a University of Chicago shirt because they recently moved from Chicago, Annie puts sweet & low in her lemonade. These things don’t advance the plot or have any thematic importance, they just make the world feel more real. Most modern rom com heroines are styled like department store mannequins, but Annie is kind of unstylish- all messy hair and too many bags to carry. I could imagine a modern day rom com having a makeover scene, but here it’s not some fatal flaw Annie has to overcome, it’s just part of who she is.

One of the reasons Ephron gets away with keeping the lovers apart for so long is that the film's heart is paternal, not romantic. What I found myself caring most about was the story of a single dad trying to raise his son. The casting director did an amazing job in finding Ross Malinger, a child actor who manages to pull off a precocious character without becoming annoying. He’s got fantastic chemistry with Hanks and their relationship is probably one of the best father/son dynamics presented on film. (It’s also strikingly similar to the relationship between Liam Neeson and Thomas Sansgter in Love Actually, which I must assume was inspired by this film.)

Sleepless in Seattle isn’t a perfect movie. It’s a little too long and a little too slow. For a classic rom com, it’s surprisingly lacking in romance. But for all its faults, it has personality. Unlike the bland, mass produced rom coms of today, Sleepless in Seattle feels like a labor of love. The actors treat their characters with respect, never going for a cheap laugh at the expense of their humanity. And while Ephron inserts a bit of self-referential mocking, she clearly loves and respects the rom com genre. More importantly she loves and respects the rom com audience.

Ephron leaves the movie open-ended. Annie and Sam finally meet atop the Empire State Building and hold hands as they ride the elevator back down. That’s it. There’s no kiss, no “one year later” scene at their wedding. The movie essentially ends with a beginning, with two people who have woken up from their complacency and are now starting on a new, unknown path. We don’t know if they’ll live happily ever after, but we know they’re both willing to try. It’s that blend of sentimentality and realism that keeps Nora Ephron’s film feeling fresh two decades later. 

Reality factor: Sleepless in Seattle is a surprisingly realistic rom com, mostly because the romance is kept to a bare minimum and friendships drive the film. Jonah’s impromptu solo trip to New York is the only thing that raises this movie’s fantasy-levels. [4 out of 5] 

Eye-candy factor: Nora Ephron seems to favor nerdy leading men rather than dashing ones. It’s okay though, I’d take a man with a heart of gold over one with abs of steel any day. (Fun fact, I once sat behind Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson at a play and it was the best two hours of my life.) [2 out of 5] 

Aww factor: I really can’t overemphasize how great the father/son dynamic is in this movie. The lovely scene in which Sam comforts his son after a nightmare is topped only by their heartfelt reunion on top of the Empire State Building. [5 out of 5]