Sam posits than men simply don't work like women do (Ephron evokes similar ideas in When Harry Met Sally.) Yet when push comes to shove, he has to fall in love with Annie.
#62 DOWN HEARD IN SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE MOVIE#
We see him dismiss the kind of movie romance that guides Annie, instead evoking the more masculine The Dirty Dozen in one of the film's funniest scenes. Sam falls in love with her unbeknownst to him, actively pursuing other women and putting down her letter as impossible. Yet even with this premise, you can't help but root for them. It sounds ridiculous, and she acknowledges it as that. She is almost entirely motivated by the kind of love you see in the movies, the idea that true love can bring you together against the reality of time and space. This turns into an exercise of absurdity in a way, going as far as hiring a private investigator to stalk Sam, and eventually lying her way into flying out to meet him for her work as a journalist. Yet she cannot help but throw that all away for Sam, a man she never sees or meets until the final minutes of the film. Engaged to a nice guy, she has a stable family, good job with a good boss. In contrast to Sam, her life could not be more stable at the beginning of the film. This deconstruction of the rom-com genre is especially apparent in the character of Annie. Ephron's steady hand guides us through the entire time. Yet, this deconstruction never feels counterintuitive. Instead of a traditional "meet-cute," Ephron makes that the climax rather than the beginning. Both characters are being pulled into each other's gravitational pull, through deliberate actions and chance. Sam deals with the death of his wife, his changed relationship with his young son Jonah ( Ross Malinger), and re-entering the dating scene in his newly adopted home of Seattle, while Annie deals with her impending marriage to nebbish nice guy Walter ( Bill Pullman), and the back and forth of her obsession with Sam after hearing his story on a radio show. Instead of focusing on Sam and Annie's relationship together, she chooses to build up each character separately. So while she may be directly disregarding tropes of the genre, she is also making the audience aware of those tropes, and how she is choosing to break them. She chooses to meet Sam (Tom Hanks) on top of the Empire State Building because of a scene from the film. The motivations of Meg Ryan's character, Annie, are especially influenced by the movie. Characters often discuss films, particularly the 1957 film An Affair to Remember, starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. To start, Ephron situates the film within the genre itself, without being overly "meta" or in your face.
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