7 / 10
Official trailer
Sleepless in Seattle is a good solid 7. Nora Ephron built a romantic comedy in which the two leads don’t meet until the last scene, and made it work on the strength of two very likable actors doing most of their acting alone.
Tom Hanks plays Sam, a widower who moves to Seattle with his son and accidentally becomes a national radio celebrity when the boy calls a talk show about his father’s loneliness. Meg Ryan plays Annie, a Baltimore journalist engaged to a decent man she doesn’t love, who hears the broadcast in her car.
I like this film more than I admire it. Hanks breaks my heart in the Seattle half, Ryan charms me in the Baltimore half, and the film goes down easy. What keeps it at a 7 is the romance at the center, and I don’t think it ever quite becomes one.
It cost about $21 million and made roughly $227 million. It’s the film that made Hanks and Ryan a permanent pairing, and it’s not as good as the one they made five years later.
The Setup
Sam’s wife has died. He can’t sleep, he can’t talk about it, and his eight-year-old son Jonah decides to fix it by calling a national radio psychologist on Christmas Eve. Sam gets talked into the call and says something true about his marriage on live radio. Two thousand women write to him. Annie is one of them, and she doesn’t send the letter until later, after she has driven past his house, hired a private investigator and behaved in ways the film decides are romantic.
The plan is the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day, lifted directly from An Affair to Remember. The film quotes it constantly and leans on it for most of its emotional weight.
The Structure
The leads share the screen for about two minutes. Everything else is Sam in Seattle talking to his friend and his son, and Annie in Baltimore talking to her editor and her fiancé about a man she has never met.
That’s a bold construction, and it’s the thing people admire about the film. It’s also the reason it doesn’t reach higher than a 7 for me. A romance where the couple never interacts has to run entirely on the audience wanting it, and the film knows that, and leans on An Affair to Remember to fill the gap.
What holds it together is that both halves are enjoyable on their own. Hanks is funny and sad in the same breath, and Ryan makes Annie’s obsession likable when the script has her doing things that would frighten most people.
Hanks and Ryan
Hanks is very good. Sam’s grief is specific, and the scene where he tries to explain to his friend what his marriage was like, the way his wife could peel an apple in one piece, is the best moment in the film.
That apple line wrecks me. It’s such a small detail, and Hanks says it like a man who’s only now realizing he’ll never see it again.
Ryan has the harder job. Annie is engaged to Bill Pullman’s Walter, who is allergic to everything and completely inoffensive, and the film has to make abandoning him look like courage instead of cruelty. She nearly manages it. Rosie O’Donnell and Rob Reiner get the funniest material as the friends. Reiner’s scene explaining tiramisu to a widower who has been out of the dating market since the 1970s is the best-written comedy in the picture.
For Writers
The two leads share two minutes of screen time, so Ephron makes their friends carry the conversations the couple can’t have. When your protagonists can’t be together, give them confidants worth listening to. When you write a story that keeps characters apart, invest in the secondary relationships that let each one think out loud. Look at where your hero explains themselves. If it’s only in narration, you need a friend, a rival or a stranger to say it to. Thoughts on the page are flat. Thoughts said out loud to somebody who disagrees are a scene.
Jonah
The child drives the plot, and that’s a risk. Ross Malinger plays Jonah as a practical eight-year-old running a campaign: he calls the radio station, he reads the letters, he books a flight to New York on his father’s credit card and gets on the plane alone.
None of that would happen now, and even in 1993 it takes a lot of goodwill. The film survives it because Malinger plays the kid as businesslike instead of cute, and because Sam’s reaction, sheer terror, is the right one. The child also gives the Seattle half its purpose. Without Jonah, Sam is a sad man in a houseboat for two hours. With him, the grief has somebody to push against.
Jonah is the film’s secret weapon as far as I’m concerned. Without him I’d find Sam’s half too mopey, and Malinger’s businesslike campaign gives me somebody to root for while the adults dither.
For Writers
Jonah does everything the adults can’t: he calls the radio station, writes the letter, books the flight. Give the job of driving the plot to the character with the least to lose. When your protagonists are too cautious to act, look for a secondary character whose lack of judgment can start the fire. Ask who in your cast would do the reckless thing without weighing it. Hand them the match.
The An Affair to Remember Problem
The film borrows its ending, its meeting place and most of its emotional weight from a 1957 Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr picture, and it’s completely open about that. Annie watches it and sobs. The men in the film respond by quoting The Dirty Dozen. That gag is the best joke in the picture and also an admission. Sleepless in Seattle knows it’s a film about people who want the feeling a film once gave them.
Some viewers find that charming. I find it the reason the romance stays at arm’s length. The characters are in love with a movie, and the movie they’re in gets its ending from it.
Ephron in 1993
This is the middle of her three big romantic comedies: When Harry Met Sally in 1989, this in 1993, You’ve Got Mail in 1998. Same star twice, and the same interest in how people in cities talk about love instead of having it.
Her dialogue is the reason all three last. Everybody is quick, everybody has opinions about food and books and other people’s relationships, and nobody says anything sincere without being embarrassed about it afterward. She’s also unusually good on grief, and that isn’t a usual romantic comedy subject. The Seattle half of this film is about a widower with a child, played straight, and that’s what gives the lighter material something to sit on.
The Ending
They meet on the observation deck, Jonah’s backpack is left behind as the excuse, and the film ends on a handshake and an elevator. It’s restrained by modern standards and it’s the right call.
What’s missing is any sense of who they’ll be together. The film has spent two hours making them likable separately and has nothing to say about them as a couple, because it ends the moment they become one. That’s the 7. It’s warm, funny, beautifully cast and slightly hollow at the center, and I’ve enjoyed it every time I’ve seen it anyway.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Ephron’s structure keeps her leads apart for two hours and makes it work by giving each of them a world worth watching. The romance is a promise, not a relationship, and the film ends before it has to deliver. When you build a story on anticipation, know that the ending has to arrive before the reader starts asking what happens next.
Is Sleepless in Seattle worth watching?
Yes. It’s warm, funny, and Hanks and Ryan are both excellent, even though they’re barely in the same room. The comedy around the edges, Rosie O’Donnell, Rob Reiner and an eight-year-old running a matchmaking operation, is sharper than the romance.
It’s a 7. I’ll take When Harry Met Sally or You’ve Got Mail over it any day, because both let the couple talk to each other. This is still the one people remember, and I get why, but a love story where the lovers barely meet leaves me warm and a little empty.
