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When Jonah calls up a late-night radio show and asks the host to help his father find love, Sam is forced on to the airwaves. Meanwhile, Annie Reed (Ryan) is a journalist who is in a perfectly serviceable relationship with the earnest, if bumbling, Walter (Bill Pullman). In case you are also in the dark, Sleepless in Seattle tracks Sam Baldwin (Hanks) as he attempts to create a new life for himself and his son, Jonah, following the death of his wife. Tom Hanks’s real-life wife Rita Wilson plays his sister Suzy in the film. Yet, it is the balance of melancholy and fizzing optimism that underpins every word of Ephron’s gorgeous screenplay. It takes the sparky Meg Ryan and places her with a fiance who is … well, fine. How is it so sad, but so happy? It takes the avatar for Hollywood’s hope – Tom Hanks – but makes him jaded and completely resigned to a future without love. I feared there would be one too many stereotypes, one too many references that flew clean over my mid-90s head, and that the film would fail as both rom and com. Caught in an era when technology – something that has undeniably changed the way we experience romance (and everything else besides) – was neither non-existent nor pervasive. Much like the elements of Friends that have aged badly, I was concerned that Ephron’s world would feel glib and caught between times. The desire to find something else, the thing that will push them from surviving to truly living, is irresistible
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It’s relatively easy to watch Frank Capra’s screwball comedies without imposing a 21st-century social lens on to them, but it’s harder for products from the late 1980s and 90s. Why? Well I always assumed they would feel outdated.