![]() ![]() ![]() This hysteria is a direct result of Maggie’s death. Their chemistry on the top of the Empire State Building is a unique and beautiful thing, but their paths crossing is a not some symptom of their inevitable romantic compatibility but rather an astronomically improbable combination of coincidence and hysterical behavior by Annie and Sam’s son Jonah. Sam and Annie are not destined for any great historical romance. If you were to remove the soundtrack, or replace it with, say, a solo cello, the true, dark, beautiful-dark nature of this story would be revealed. and Jimmy Durante and Nat King Cole, tunes specifically engineered by Hollywood scientists to coat the bitter pill of this gothic “love” story with enough sweetness to delude an entire generation of filmgoers into thinking this movie is about a man and a woman falling in love. It’s the soundtrack that’s conventional and saccharine, classic jazz love ballads crooned by Harry Connick, Jr. So why is this film’s reputation so conventional and saccharine? I lay the blame on the soundtrack. Sam’s is an alien point-of-view, but Annie recognizes it as one that will complete her in a way that perpetuating her current pattern by marrying Walter will not. Never has she had cause to seriously ponder the perspective of someone like Sam who has known death, who willingly moves from the skin-splitting cold of Chicago to the bitter gray rain of Seattle for the purposes of properly serving his and his son’s grieving process. Annie’s family and fiance and her adorable work friends, they are dotty but they are fundamentally about life, their collective attitudes and perspectives as bright as the orange on an Orioles cap. She stalks Sam so mercilessly because what he has said on the radio opened the doorway for her to a life, romantic and otherwise, defined by death, not life. Which is why Annie is so fascinated, observing them from the shadows across the street. The fun that we see Sam and Jonah having with each other is “romantic” in its aura of tragic sweetness, their lives lived not in ignorance of death, quite the opposite, in direct, knowing defiance of it. The romance poets knew that death was at least the equal of love in its ability to evoke the deepest human emotions, and as such this film still technically qualifies as a “romantic” comedy, just not how the word is typically defined. Just because Sleepless isn’t about love doesn’t mean it’s not romantic. He and his son Jonah, a young boy named after a Biblical drowner who himself dreams of drowning, their lives on their are characterized by death. Together the two “deaths” form a set of tragic poles around which Sam’s heart traverses during the course of the film. The death of Annie’s relationship with Walter, her fiance, is every bit as tragic as the death of Sam’s wife Maggie before the start of the film. In order for marriage to mean anything at all, it must be undertaken with confidence that you bring to it the same values you bring to your life. ![]() It is about a woman who requires the stark focus of grief (someone else’s, not her own) in order to find and honor the unpleasant truths that she knows to be true: Life is very short, and, paradoxically, marriage is very long. This is a story about grief, about a crushed child unwilling to see his father crushed by loneliness as well as grief. The primary motivation of all of the action, plot points, crises, and decisions by the characters, is death. But the film’s central plot, of widower Seattlite Sam and confused Baltimorean Annie gradually finding each other in New York City, does not have romantic love as its primary motivation. It features love it is a frequent topic of dialogue. The script contains many of Nora Ephron’s now-recognizable hallmarks such as painfully cute conveniences and contrivances, which bothered the critics at the time, but which perfectly serve the Ephronian picture of human love, which is of a realm of human endeavour that lies outside logic and rationality, the fact of which entices or repels the characters in the story depending on where they are in the plot.īut Sleepless is not about love. Sleepless in Seattle, released in 1993 just as the 90s rom-com boom was peaking is regarded as a stereotypical example of the genre, combining lush emotions with well-executed humor by some of the era’s best film comedians. This is a key part of the genre’s analysis of love: showing us which aspects are funny, thereby offering us new perspectives on our own romantic habits. The better rom-coms connect the romance to the comedy by showing situations where the thoughts and activities of love are, when viewed through a certain lens, or even just viewed from the outside, inherently funny. ![]() Romantic comedies present themselves as meditations on the nature of romantic love, carried along by, or at least punctuated by, jokes. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |