Trailer Park: Sleepless In Seattle
Movie
Sleepless In Seattle, released June 25 1993
Trailer Synopsis
Tom Hanks has a dead wife and a precocious son and lives in Seattle. Meg Ryan hears his tale of woe on a radio call-in show while living in Baltimore, where she is engaged to Bill Pullman and debates the nature of fate with Rosie O’Donnell. Thanks to the fact that the man in question is Tom Hanks, he has apparently become America’s most eligible bachelor. Ryan seems unhinged in her fantasizing about this guy she knows little about who lives thousands of miles away, and Hanks is reluctant to try dating again as a very popular widower. Also Rob Reiner refers to tiramisu as some kind of sex act and compliments Hanks’ butt.
Does It Honestly Represent the Movie?
More or less. Hanks plays Sam Baldwin, an architect who tries to rescue himself from the specter of his late wife by moving to the then-newly-hip city of Seattle, where they drink strong coffee and listen to Mudhoney. (Unlike in Singles, not a single member of a grunge band appears in this film.) Sam just wants to live a life of solitude and focus on raising his oft-irritating tween son Jonah (Ross Malinger, though he looks so much like a Lawrence brother that I’m not entirely sure he isn’t), but most everybody else in his orbit—including Jonah and Sam’s pal and confidante Jay (Rob Reiner)—wants him to get back into the dating pool post haste. Assuming his dad can’t find a stepmom all by himself, Jonah calls into a late night radio show and gives the lonely women of America the pitch for his dad.
Soon thousands of women are sending hand-written letters asking to be the new Mrs. Sleepless in Seattle (a nickname the radio host gives Sam because he is an insomniac and also now lives in the Pacific Northwest). Those would-be pursuers include Annie Reed (Ryan), a newspaper reporter from Baltimore who pursues the story of Sam’s viral fame first in the name of journalism and then in the name of wanting to abandon her sneezy fiancé Walter (Bill Pullman) for a perfect stranger (and not Balki or Cousin Larry).
Does It Make You Want to See the Movie?
It certainly did then! There’s not a whole lot of real hooks in the trailer to Sleepless in Seattle, but this was the first movie I ever saw by myself because nobody in my orbit wanted to take an 11-year-old boy to see a mildly weepy romcom that was also a Joe Versus the Volcano reunion. Maybe I was attached to Hanks because of the sheer number of times I had watched Big on VHS, or maybe I was just enamored of this cool place where all my favorite bands hailed from. (Also I had recently seen This Is Spinal Tap, so maybe I thought Rob Reiner was a signifier of comedy gold?)
The trailer has a real meandering quality to it, though it’s not like the movie itself is a propulsive thrill ride. It largely focuses on writer/director Nora Ephron’s dialogue, which felt pretty keen-eyed at the time but mostly feels dated now.
What’s Weird About It?
Is it me, or does that treacly bit of score feel extra invasive? Also the sheer number of bits baked into this thing is a little jarring, and a lot of them are given the exact wrong amount of space. For example, the trailer introduces the Walter character with a scene at some sort of fancy family dinner where he and Annie announce their engagement. Walter does a bit from Pride of the Yankees that I guess doesn’t play well with Annie’s fuddy-duddy parents, but it drops us in at the halfway point of the bit and then gives Annie a line trying to explain it. It requires either way more or way less set-up, and honestly doesn’t belong in there at all. It’d be one thing if it set up some bit of physical comedy, but it’s just kind of a waste of trailer real estate.
Was “tiramisu” an actual thing or is that Ephron just making up something that sounds like it could be kinky slang? Either way I’m kind of into it and would love to know how Rob Reiner came to be aware of it.
Does It Spoil the Movie?
There’s a lot of plot laid out in this trailer, and in a normal movie that would represent the first two-thirds of the movie before the final 20 minutes where our two leads have some sort of adventure or set piece. But the weird secret of Sleepless In Seattle is that Hanks and Ryan, two of the biggest stars in the world at the time, are on screen together basically for the last two minutes of the movie. The second they finally get together, the credits roll, and while it works for the type of story Ephron is telling, it is mildly disingenuous to present this movie with this poster and then keep your two stars apart for 99 percent of it. So it does give away all the relevant plot points but you wouldn’t actually know that until you saw the movie, which I guess is accidentally savvy?
Final Analysis
Again, I have no idea what the advertising for Sleepless In Seattle activated in me when I was 11, but it is a very low-key charmer that coasts on some strong writing and two absolute movie star supernovas trading screen time. I wasn’t the only one: Sleepless In Seattle grosses $126 million at the domestic box office, making it the fourth most successful release of the year behind Jurassic Park, The Fugitive and The Firm and just in front of Mrs. Doubtfire and Indecent Proposal. I’d probably rank this third in the Hanks/Ryan Triptych, but it retains a lot of its period-specific charms. All the trailer really had to do was point the camera at those two, and in that sense it’s mission accomplished. 6/10