That combination of sentimentality and skepticism makes Sleepless sing. You just can’t imagine the movie without it because it is what the movie it is.” “There’s no reason for it,” Ephron would later admit. That’s never more clear than in the scene where Rita Wilson (Hanks’s real-life spouse plays his character’s sister in Sleepless) summarizes An Affair to Remember in tearful detail. “We’re trying to be smart, sophisticated, and funny about movies like this, but we want to be one too.” “We’re trying to have our cake and eat it too,” she told Rolling Stone. It’s really kind of hooking into those pathetic female fantasies.”Įphron realized that the only way to comment on the expectations elevated by movies like An Affair to Remember or 1939’s Love Affair, was to write a movie just like them. As an adult, she continued, “I now look at this movie and say, ‘What was I thinking?’” She got downright disdainful about it in another interview, calling Affair a “weepy” film that appeals to “one’s deepest masochistic core…. When she first watched the Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr–led romance, “I was a hopeless teenage girl awash in salt water,” Ephron told Rolling Stone. By the time Ephron, the film’s fourth attached writer, got to the script, 1957’s An Affair to Remember had already become a character in the movie, much to Ephron’s chagrin. (At one point, Annie enters her office at The Baltimore Sun to hear the tail-end of a coworker’s pitch: “he’s the meanest guy in the world, but he makes the best soup you’ve ever eaten.”) There’s also the following interoffice exchange:īut it also retained the genre’s unabashedly romantic DNA. In Ephron’s hands, the script was imbued with her biting East Coast wit, including a pre- Seinfeld “Soup Nazi” reference. According to film producer Gary Foster, Ephron was hired as “a slightly cynical New Yorker who was looking to put a little edge in the fairy tale.” As Ephron told Rolling Stone in 1993, she was merely “looking for a cash infusion.” But she had her directive in mind, once declaring of the film: “Our dream was to make a movie about how movies screw up your brain about love, and then if we did a good job, we would become one of the movies that would screw up people’s brains about love forever.” Writer-director Nora Ephron, who sandwiched Sleepless in between 1989’s When Harry Met Sally and 1998’s You’ve Got Mail, understood the mix of sour and sweet required to get one love-drunk. Ward, and Jeff Arch, endures three decades later. You want to be in love in a movie,” Annie’s best friend, Becky ( Rosie O’Donnell), says-both a warning to the character and summary of why Sleepless in Seattle, directed by Nora Ephron from a screenplay by Ephron, David S. “It was like coming home, only to no home I’d ever known.” Thousands of miles away, Annie is one of many listeners entranced by the story, maybe by the mere sound of Sam’s voice. “I knew it the very first time I touched her,” he says. ![]() Once on the line, he heartbreakingly describes the moment he fell in love with Jonah’s mother. At one point, Sam gets roped into joining the call. Unfolding during the typically dreary period between Christmas and Valentine’s Day, Annie and Sam’s cross-country meet-cute begins with a Delilah-style radio show, which Jonah calls into with one request: find a new wife for his father. This is only the start of their romance, but it’s the end of Sleepless in Seattle, released 30 years ago and now remembered as one of the best romantic comedies of all time. The Seattle widower and Baltimore journalist finally meet-where else-atop the observation deck of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day, as Sam’s son, Jonah ( Ross Malinger), looks on adoringly. ![]() ![]() Sleepless in Seattle then confirms that Annie is right to believe in destiny because so many signs point them to one another, including how Sam immediately feels drawn to Annie the moment he sees her at the airport, and how Jonah’s bag is left on top of the Empire State Building and Annie finds it.įate and destiny play a major role in many holiday romantic movies, especially those on Hallmark.“Shall we?” Tom Hanks’s Sam asks Meg Ryan’s Annie, lifting his hand toward hers as a slight breeze blows and the music swells. We also see how much Annie and best friend Becky (Rosie O’Donnell) love An Affair To Remember, so much so that they use meeting on the Empire State Building as part of Sam and Annie’s meetup plans. We see her quickly swept up into Sam’s story and the idea of meeting him and possibly being his soulmate. However, right after she discusses destiny with her mother, Annie’s true hopeless romantic side begins to show. ![]() She wants herself and others to believe that she’s very practical when it comes to love, hence marrying stable, nice, reliable, slightly boring Walter. Sleepless In Seattle Is A Romantic Movie That Believes In DestinyĪnnie starts the movie as a secret romantic.
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