"Sleepless in Seattle"
                          A Film Review
                               by
                      Linda Lopez McAlister
               "The Women's Show"  WMNF-FM, Tampa

   Nora Ephron is back in the director's chair for the second time
(her directorial debut was last year's "This is My Life") although
before she started directing she had written the screenplay for
"When Harry Met Sally" and adapted her own novel "Heartburn" for
film.

   At first I thought I wasn't going to like this film.  It started
out so treacly with lots of talk about love being "fated" and how
when you met the right person you just feel the magic and know it's
forever, etc.  I was getting ready for another bout of Hollywood
feel-good, romantic manipulation of the sort we got recently in
"Used People."   But that was before I saw what I think Nora Ephron
is up to here.  This is no simple-minded innocent romance.  It is
a sophisticated, very savvy, 1990s homage to the Hollywood romances
of the '40s and '50s.  Though it looks upon them with nostalgia,
Ephron knows you can't just straightforwardly copy that genre in
the 1990s.  You have to approach it obliquely; things are a lot
more complicated these days.  So she plays with the conventions of
these old romances, she uses the soundtrack to poke fun at them,
she even has every woman in the film quoting dialogue from that
great example of the genre, "An Affair to Remember" starring Cary
Grant and Deborah Kerr.

   Like those old films this one has a convoluted plot that I don't
want to summarize. Suffice to say that Annie (Meg Ryan), a reporter
for the Baltimore Sun and engaged to be married, hears Sam
(Tom Hanks) one night on a radio talk show that his 8 year-old son
had called to ask for help in finding a new wife for his widowed
dad.   Since Sam lives in Seattle and admits to insomnia the radio
psychologist taking the calls dubs him "Sleepless in Seattle."
Annie falls in love with this man she's never seen. He's getting
letters from would-be wives by the armload and he's only interested
in thinking about those who live nearby--not in Baltimore.  The
kid, Jonah, who hates the woman his Dad has begun dating, is
partial to Annie (thanks to a letter she wrote) so he sets about to
try to convince them to meet, as Annie had suggested in her letter
(straight out of "An Affair to Remember"), on the observation tower
of the Empire State Building on Valentine's Day.  Do they?  What do
you think?  Not only that, but there's a great big red valentine
lit up on the side of the building.

    On the way to this inevitable happy ending, however, there is
just lots of funny stuff.  I started doing movie reviews because so
many times I thought that the movie reviewers (exclusively male in
this neck of the woods) just didn't get it when it
came to films women like a lot.  So I was a set up for a scene in
which Sam's sister launches into an impassioned and teary
plot summary of "An Affair to Remember" while her brother and
husband sit there utterly dumbfounded and uncomprehending of how
she could be so swept away by that film.  Then they launch into
their own rip-roaring discussion of the fine points of some beloved
war film and she sits there, utterly dumbfounded and uncompehending
of their taste in films as well.  I haven't laughed so hard at a
scene in a film in ages.  There's a similar one earlier in the film:
Annie and her best friend (Rosie O'Donnell) rattle off the tv
commercials that make them tear up, while two male colleagues
shake their heads in disbelief.

   One of the things I take Nora Ephron to be trying to do with
"Sleepless in Seattle" is to make a film that is NEITHER a women's
film nor a man's film but one that appeals equally to both.  So,
although the main objects of her homage are "weepies" or women's
films, at the same time she keeps the focus very strongly on Sam
and Adam and how Sam deals with his grief and then the trials and
tribulations of his re-entering the dating game after 15 years of
being out of circulation.  (Rob Reiner has a very funny scene
instructing him about what he might encounter.)  My hunch is that
she has succeeded in making an equal opportunity film for both men
and women.  The audience I saw it with was fairly evenly divided
between the sexes and it's the first film I have seen in a long
time where the audience burst into applause when it was over.  I
guess it was a good feeling to find a film that doesn't
insult your intelligence; that has no sex, violence, or bad
language; that's populated with people you like; that's funny, and
ends on a low-key but happy note.  "Sleepless in Seattle" is such
a film.

  For the WMNF Women's Show this is Linda Lopez McAlister on Women
and Film.

Copyright 1993 by Linda Lopez McAlister.  No portion of this review
may be reproduced or reprinted without permission of the author.