Sleepless in Seattle ***** (1993, Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Ross Malinger) – Classic Movie Review 811

Ah, you must remember this… C0-writer/director Nora Ephron’s 1993 delightfully funny and deliciously warm-hearted romantic comedy mixes laughs and love in the most winning of ways. Like the radio DJ in the movie, it’s incredibly manipulative, but who cares when the trick works its magic? There shouldn’t be a dry eye in the house at the big finish at the Empire State Building.

It’s a shock now to see Tom Hanks looking so young and cute as married architect father Sam Baldwin, who lives in Chicago with his little eight-year-old son Jonah (Ross Malinger), who we first see at the funeral of the boy’s mother, after her death from cancer. Anxious to start again, Sam moves with the kid to a riverfront house in Seattle where it rains nine months a year. A year and a half later, Sam is still grieving and not dating, but Jonah is desperate for a new mom.

Meanwhile, in Baltimore, romantically-inclined newspaper reporter Annie Reed (Meg Ryan) is engaged and planning to get married soon to nice, dull, phobia-afflicted, straight-laced Bill Pullman, and takes him over the holidays to meet her family, who love him, just as she thinks she does. One night she driving in the car, idly changing the channels, when she hears Jonah pouring out his heart to a live radio talk-show, who talks the kid into putting his surprised dad on the line, and telling his story.

Sam is an instant hit with thousands of female listeners and receives a deluge of letters of comfort and offers of romance after the kid gives the radio station their address. Inspired by Sam’s story and Hollywood romance. Annie becomes convinced she and Sam are destined to meet and she writes to him, her letter sent by her boss Rosie O’Donnell. Now Annie decides to do a story on Sam, investigates him, tracks him down and goes to meet him.

Sleepless in Seattle is a sweet, cute, funny, perfect date movie, expertly made and performed with more humour than sentimentality, though with loads of both. It’s tailor made for all those who take their ideas of love from the old popular songs that play liberally on the soundtrack and from the movies, especially 1957’s An Affair to Remember, the Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr movie that it lovingly refers to throughout.

Hanks and Ryan give spot-on performances, naturalistic, low key, charming and winning, and there’s a lot for little Malinger to do – in some ways the film depends on him – and he does it like a professional who’s been acting 50 years. It helps a lot that there are several excellent comedians aboard the film, and they all have a couple of good scenes to shine – Rosie O’Donnell, Rob Reiner and Dana Ivey are especially amusing.

Hanks’s real wife Rita Wilson has one good scene too. You can feel a bit sorry for underrated Pullman, since the heroine and the script treat him appallingly, but he’s got plenty to do and does it steadfastly. It’s hard to make a sympathetic character out of this, but Pullman pulls it off.

Over a couple of decades, Sleepless in Seattle has become the touchstone for modern romantic comedies. The writing, direction and editing are incredibly smart and slick, producing a fast-moving dynamic movie that rattles along for an hour and three quarters smoothly, effortlessly and beguilingly. Of course it all starts with the witty script, which is by Ephron, David S Ward and Jeff Arch, who wrote the original story.

Sven Nykvist films it in glorious Technicolor so it looks a vintage treat, recalling the visuals of golden age Hollywood movies and making America look like an up-market travel advertisement.

Showing again in UK cinemas in 2014, but for one night only – Valentine’s Day!

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 811

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