_Sleepless in Seattle_

                   reviewed by Cynthia Fuchs



     Does it bother anyone else that _Sleepless in Seattle_
is being marketed with a retread of the _When Harry Met
Sally..._ poster? Two people - male and female - gaze longingly
at each other from either side of the poster, towering over a
cityscape like the 50-foot woman. It looks as if they may have
simply substituted Tom Hanks for Billy Crystal, leaving Meg Ryan
(the female in both) intact, gazing longingly at whoever happens
to be there.

     This re-staging suggests that Ryan is either a very
successful actor (already re-playing her greatest role) or a very
limited one (already re-playing her greatest role). Those who
tend to think the latter may take small comfort in the fact that
in the new film she doesn't fake an orgasm in the deli. 

     _Sleepless_ is so terminally sweet (and so convinced of
its mission to revitalize summer "romance'') that the fated
lovers Annie and Sam don't even meet until the final scene. That
they do so atop the Empire State Building is an allusion - as
this movie reminds us repeatedly - to _An Affair to
Remember_, in which Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr overcome years
worth of obstacles (she's run down by a cab) and
misunderstandings in order to consummate their passion at last.
In _Sleepless_ though, passion is only available second-hand,
as when the women characters weep as they watch _An Affair to
Remember_ on television. Or, as Annie's best friend (Rosie
O'Donnell, in danger of becoming the new Eve Arden) tells her,
"You don't want to be in love, you want to be in love in a
movie.''

     Director/cowriter Nora Eprhon (who also wrote _When Harry
Met Sally..._, so we might be forewarned that deep insight into
gender roles and cultural versions of sexuality is not what's
happening here) is actually pretty good at concocting this kind
of punchy one-line wisdom. (And O'Donnell is better at delivering
it than she is at weeping while watching Cary Grant). But as in
_When Harry Met Sally..._, the larger frame of
_Sleepless_ is not sarcastic, but completely affected,
"sincere,'' irritating, and derivative. The point here is not
that old fashioned mythologies and retro-gender roles mess with
your head. It is instead that there is such a thing as what
Annie's mom calls "magic,'' that extraordinary whoosh and close-
up that comes when you first take the hand of your predestined
mate. 

     Yuck. 

     _Sleepless in Seattle_ (or as a friend of mine dubbed
it, _Asleep in Seattle_) is really a re-movie, one comprised
of pieces from many others. Poor Annie in Batimore is affianced
to boring, excessively allergic niceguy Walter (Bill Pullman).
What she really wants is someone who is passionate and who
doesn't sneeze. While listening to a radio call-in show, she
hears him: Sam in Seattle sadly describes his perfect dead wife,
and Annie and hundreds of other women are struck by his devotion.
They all write him besmitten letters, but guess what, his young
son Jonah (Ross Malinger) likes her letter best because she likes
baseball (is that how she met Rosie O'Donnell?). 

     Jonah, being a precocious-movie-child, must be right. He
decides to take Annie up on her invitation to meet on Valentine's
Day on the Empire State Building, and sets about trying to remove
Sam from the clutches of a ditzy interior designer who laughs,
the kid says "like a hyena.'' Otherwise, he functions as a foil
for Sam/Hanks' rather remarkable boyish charm (see also, Penny
Marshall's _Big_). In this adorable boy-mode, both Jonah and
Sam appear to be the perfect unit-catch for any woman, especially
one who, like Annie, covets love-at-first-sightness. 

     In this universe, women are desperate to be married, and
still discuss that infamous statistic regarding marriage-ability
and age. This is what makes this a "date-movie'' rather than a
chick flick, I suppose: men remain indispensible, even though
they might benefit from sensitivity training. (The film's best
comic bit is when Hanks ironically demonstrates that men
*can* cry at movies too, sobbing as he retells the end of
_The Dirty Dozen_, but this is a rare moment). 

     Men (including Sam and his best friend, played by Rob
Reiner, who seems typecast in this "gee-I-don't-get-it'' role
after directing _When Harry..._ and _A Few Good Men_)
spend their time discussing their confusion over changing
courtship rituals (Sam fears _Fatal Attraction_ and Reiner's
character seems especially put off that you only "get to do it
with a condom''). Sam tells himself, "I just wanna get laid,''
but we know that he really wants to lavish more sensitive
devotion on another version of his perfect dead wife (model and
ex-Bond girl Cary Lowell, who appears to him as a ghost, to tell
him to get on with his life; now that's a newsflash he apparently
needs and we emphatically do not). 

     Predictability is the primary motif. _Sleepless_
shamelessly reaffirms the shameless cliche-mongering of _When
Harry Met Sally..._. Its most egregious banalities are rehashed
torch: for much of the film, there's no dialogue (why say it with
words when you can say it with Hallmarkisms?), just images (of
Sam and Jonah, of Annie with kleenex, of the grey Seattle
skyline) accompanied by re-music, like Jimmy Durante singing "As
Time Goes By,'' Joe Cocker singing "Blackbird,'' or Carly Simon
singing anything. 

     _Sleepless_ is being sold, pre-release, as "the sleeper
hit of the summer.'' Like everything else about it, such a
prediction seems annoyingly calculated, beneath its "romantic''
veneer. 




Cynthia Fuchs teaches film and media studies at George Mason University.

Copyright by Cynthia Fuchs.  All rights reserved.
Please do not reprint this review without the permission of the author.

This review originally appeared in the Philadelphia _City Paper_.