Why Sleepless in Seattle is a Love Letter to Rom Com Lovers

I recently wrote about this film on my blog Rom Coms and the Real World: http://realworldromcom.blogspot.com/2013/03/review.html

How do you write a romantic comedy in which the central couple doesn’t meet until the last five minutes of the movie? The answer is, you don’t. Nora Ephron’s 1993 Sleepless in Seattle isn’t really a romantic comedy so much as it’s a love letter to the rom com genre.

There’s a voyeuristic thread that runs through Sleepless in Seattle. Annie (Meg Ryan) becomes infatuated with Sam (Tom Hanks) after hearing him wax poetically on the radio about his recently deceased wife. Annie and Sam are two people on opposite sides of the country that are sleepwalking through life. Sam is trying his best to raise his eight-year-old son and get through each day without his wife at his side. Annie is trying to pretend that her engagement to milquetoast Walter (Bill Pullman) isn’t lacking in romance. Their wake-up call comes in the form of a call-in radio program. Sam verbalizes, perhaps for the first time, how truly difficult it is for him to survive without his wife. Annie, alone in her car, hears Sam talk about a kind of love she’s never really known with Walter.

Sleepless in Seattle is oddly structured. For most of the film we’re watching Meg Ryan stalk Tom Hanks as he goes about living his life mostly unaware of her. Her storyline is entirely dependent on him, while his storyline centers around his son. From a narrative point of view, it makes the movie feels slightly unbalanced. From an allegorical point of view, it makes perfect sense. I see Annie not so much as a character, but as the personification of the rom com audience. She becomes invested in a stranger, just as the rom com audience becomes invested in fictional characters. She’s smart enough to recognize that the radio host is manipulating Sam to get a poignant sound bite (just as the audience might recognize the manipulative tricks of a rom com movie), but she gets sucked in any way. Annie goes so far as to hire a Private Investigator to learn more about Sam and at one point she flies out to Seattle in hopes of meeting him. It sounds a bit crazy, but how many of us have....

Read the full article at http://realworldromcom.blogspot.com/2013/03/review.html