TITLE: SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE
DIRECTOR: NORA EPHRON
WRITERS: NORA EPHRON, DAVID S. WARD AND JEFF ARCH
THE BOTTOM LINE: This comedy of long-distance love is too long and too distant.
Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks) is an architect in Seattle, a recent widower unable to overcome his bereavement. Annie Reed (Meg Ryan) is a no-nonsense newspaperwoman in Baltimore, about to settle for a marriage more convenient than stirring.
They don't meet cute. As a matter of fact, they don't meet at all until the end of the movie. She hears him on a radio shrink's call-in program, into which he's been plugged by his eight-year-old son Jonah (Ross Malinger), who thinks it's time for Dad to get a life. Lots of other women respond to him too. Rue is a good emotional color for him, and he wears it well -- with a manliness that avoids self-pity and promises loyalty to anyone who wins his heart. But of all the letters listeners send in, it's Annie's that his son likes best, and so the boy begins to maneuver a meeting against a movieful of odds.
It's a sweet conceit, taking into account both the curious new ways we make connections along our electronic highways and romance's age-old need to crank up passion by placing frustrations in true love's path. Given that many of the + traditional obstacles like class, ethnic and religious differences are readily overcome these days by enlightened people, it's smart to recognize that about the only thing left to distance people is, yes, distance -- good old basic geography.
It may be, however, that Sleepless in Seattle is too smart for its own good. For clever as it is conceptually, it violates the most basic rule of romantic- comedy construction. If boy doesn't meet girl, then the drama of boy losing girl and the final satisfaction of boy getting girl cannot happen. The complications in this movie are all logistical. They are never confrontational, as they so giddily were in the classic comedies of muddled love, the spirit of which co-writer and director Nora Ephron has said she wanted to recapture.
To compensate, she creates, as it were, sub-conflicts. Annie's fiance (Bill Pullman) is shown to be, quite literally, a drip (allergies make his nose run); the woman Sam takes up with (Barbara Garrick) has a grating laugh. The movie condescends to both of them rather unfunnily. And, anyway, they begin to seem like time fillers, something to divert us from the fact that this film really has no center. Hanks and Ryan are, as usual, charming, and so are Malinger as destiny's underage enabler, Gaby Hoffmann as his girlfriend, eagerly egging him on, and Rosie O'Donnell as Ryan's newspaper pal. They are all given some chuckly lines to say, but no killers. Like everything else in this movie, they lack madness, and they fail to draw you out of yourself into a truly absorbing alternative reality. Mostly, Sleepless in Seattle leaves you feeling restless in the audience.