(Pretty strong argument for never watching another romantic comedy ever again…..)
CAST: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Bill Pullman, Rosie O’Donnell, Victor Garber, Ross Malinger, Carey Lowell, Rita Wilson, Carl Reiner.
DIRECTOR: Nora Ephron
WARNING: Some SPOILERS and one rather misguided heroine - straight ahead…
IT’S LIKE THIS: Baltimore dingbat Annie Reed (Meg Ryan) overhears Seattle sap Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) pining away for his dead wife Maggie (Carey Lowell) on the radio one night (courtesy of Sam’s diabolical young son Jonah - don’t ask). Despite the fact that she’s engaged to marry a perfectly sweet guy named Walter (Bill Pullman), Annie becomes convinced that Sam is her soulmate - even though she’s never met the fucker. Soon ensues a cringe-worthy crusade for Annie to travel cross-country to meet up with Sam - and fulfill her destiny. Excuse me while I find a good place to vomit.
THE DUDE (OR DUDETTE) MOST LIKELY TO SAVE THE DAY: These fuckers are all so romantically deluded, there‘s no saving them.
EYE CANDY MOST LIKELY TO FIRE UP A WOODY: None. Nada. Zip. Tom Hanks is about as asexual a guy as you can find, and Meg Ryan’s cutesy schtick becomes so fucking irritating that I kept hoping someone would wake up and realize what an idiot she’s playing and taze the living shit out of her.
MOST INTENTIONALLY SWEET SCENE: None. Lots of scenes hoping to be intentionally sweet. None that actually are. More like unintentionally nauseating.
MOST UNINTENTIONALLY SWEET SCENE: No luck here either. Lots of unintentionally hurl-inducing ones, though.
HOTTEST SCENE: None. Unless you count the sight of Meg Ryan staring off into space, dreaming about a guy she’s never met, hot. I didn’t. Not even close.
INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW: Will Annie track down Sam and meet him? Is he her soulmate? Or is she throwing away a perfectly good relationship with Walter just because she’s a fucking moron? Survey says… yes.
WHY YOU SHOULD WATCH “SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE”: If you like highly overrated and patently unrealistic romantic comedies that mistake sap and saccharine for a sense of genuine romance. And if for some reason, god help you, you actually adore Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
WHY YOU MAY NOT ENJOY “SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE”: If you like your romantic comedies to resemble something that might actually have a chance of occurring in real life. And if Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan leave you with a limp one.
FINAL ANALYSIS: Not going to waste too much energy into SLEEPLES IN SEATTLE, since I detest it about as much as I did when I first saw it back in 1993. I just have an issue with romantic comedies that perpetuate the idea that love is easy and that once you meet “The Perfect Somebody”, everything will be okay. SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE does nothing to address just how relationships really work, instead delivering its candy-assed sentiments in a astonishingly false package that somehow won over audiences and turned this film into a box-office hit.
The movie’s central flaw is how unreasonable and unsympathetic its heroine is. Here’s a woman who has everything any woman could want: a good job, good friends, and a loving fiancee. Yet, on a whim, she throws it all away and the movie never gives us a convincing reason why. This is the same issue that plagued ONLY YOU with Marisa Tomei. At least that film had the lovely Italian scenery to recommend it. SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE has, well, Seattle which, while a nice place, is no Italy. If you can’t get onboard with a movie’s main character, why should you stay for the ride? Meg Ryan’s cute-as-a-button antics only serve to further turn the character into a cartoon. Tom Hanks fares a little better as the heartbroken Sam, but in the end he is such a vanilla blandie that you can’t understand why Annie would chuck her future with Walter for this snoozer.
In the end, the less said about SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE, the better. The fact that this flick became such a blockbuster has got to be the biggest case of mass hypnosis in movie-going history.
