9 / 10
While You Were Sleeping is the romantic comedy I recommend to people who say they don’t like them. It’s built on a lie that should be unbearable and it works, because it’s really about a lonely woman being adopted by a family who won’t take no for an answer.
Jon Turteltaub directed it in 1995. It’s a 9.
The Premise
Lucy works in a token booth on the Chicago L, has no family and has spent a year silently in love with a handsome commuter. On Christmas Day she saves him from the tracks, and at the hospital a nurse mishears her and tells his family she’s his fiancée. He’s in a coma. The family, delighted, takes her in, and she can’t work out how to tell them. Then she starts falling for his brother.
The Cast
Sandra Bullock is wonderful, funny and sad and completely natural, and this is the film that made her a star. Bill Pullman plays Jack, the brother, as a decent, awkward man who’s on to her, and their scenes walking through the snow are the best in it. Peter Gallagher is the comatose fiancé, Peter Boyle and Glynis Johns are the parents, and Jack Warden is the neighbor who knows the truth and keeps it.
The Family
The Callaghans are the reason the film works. They talk over each other constantly, argue about everything, and their warmth is overwhelming, which is exactly why Lucy can’t bring herself to end it. The Christmas and New Year dinner scenes are as good as ensemble comedy gets.
The Ethical Complications
The film knows the lie is wrong. Lucy is miserable about it throughout, several people call her on it, and it doesn’t resolve with a shrug. That care is why it doesn’t curdle.
The Chicago Setting
Trains, snow, Christmas lights and a city that looks cold and lived in. It’s a proper holiday film without being a Christmas film, and it comes out every December in my house.
Craft Note
Craft Note
While You Were Sleeping gives its heroine a lie she can’t escape without hurting people who have been kind to her. Every scene tightens it, and the comedy comes from the tightening.
A sympathetic character trapped in a deception is a comic engine, as long as they’re genuinely trying to get out.
Is While You Were Sleeping worth watching?
Yes. It’s a 9, one of the best romantic comedies of the nineties, and Sandra Bullock has never been more likeable.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on one of my film lists