SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE

SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE (Directed by Nora Ephron. Starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Bill Pullman, Ross Mallinger, Rosie O'Donnell)

Now, let's get this straight. Seattle is to America what Donegal is to Ireland - the final outpost, the furthermost tip. This is the last stop before Alaska. It is just the kind of city in which alienated teenagers would dress in second hand clothes (what's the point of dressing up if there's no place to go?), play out of tune guitars (who's listening?) and sing about boredom.

Somehow they threw up Nirvana and shook the world. OK, I can accept that. Grunge could only come from a city like Seattle. What I don't get is the romantic part. Suddenly, Seattle is turning into an American Paris, city of lurve. Last year it was the setting for a host of young couplings in Singles, this year it is the turn of the middle-aged and middle class, as represented by Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, whose search for true love takes place in the kind of environment where caribou can get it on but humans are likely to freeze from the neck down.

This is a couple for whom grunge is something that would block your sink if you didn't follow a stringent cleaning routine, and for whom the Seattle sound is a steady diet of golden oldies. Yet Seattle is the city where the film-makers have stuck them, and Sleepless has gone on to become the sleaper hit of the year (being a movie that started with low expectations but has gradually risen to blockbuster status). Romance is not dead, it appears, just relocating.

After the death of his much loved wife, Sam Baldwin (Hanks) moves to Seattle with his 8-year-old son Jonah (Ross Malinger), presumably choosing the city much the way a Frenchman might opt for the foreign legion. But, as generations of movie goers are already aware, love can crop up in the strangest of places. Annie Reed (Ryan) is a journalist in Baltimore, on the other side of the American continent, about to marry a Mr. Right (Bill Pullman, today's equivalent of Tony Randall, always the best man but never the groom), when she hears Sam talking on a radio phone-in about his love for his wife and is moved to tears (along with most of the cinema audience). Since the plot rarely strays from the entirely obvious, I am not giving too much away to say the rest of the film follows the slow coming together of these apparently twin souls, separated by a continent and the minor fact that they have never met.

This, of course, is the kind of thing that only happens in the movies, a notion which Sleepless in Seattle both mocks and shamelessly embraces. "You don't wanna be in love, you wanna be in love in a movie," Rosie O'Donnell (rapidly becoming typecast as the ubiquitous fat friend) tells Meg as she sets about her hopelessly romantic quest. On one level (if it's not facetious to contemplate this populist drivel as being multi layered) the film is both an homage to, and commentary on, love in the movies, referring in particular to Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr's An Affair To Remember. All the female characters in Sleepless turn to mush at the very thought of the 1957 weepie, where the lovers almost failed to get together through unavoidable misunderstandings. The male characters are less moved. "That's a chick's movie," says Hanks, as a woman friend blubbers over the plot. "I cried at the end of The Dirty Dozen."

Cynical observations and sharp one liners pepper Sleepless. Trading in the same brand of dry humour that writer/director Nora Ephron brought to her script for When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless gets all the snap and sizzle from cynical conversations about love and dating in the '90s. Yet, while Ephron's central characters show deep ambivalence, even antipathy, to the filmic notion of romantic destiny, in what might be considered the most cynical manoeuvre of all, she undercuts her dialogue with the kind of emotional sucker punches that only romantic clichés can provide. Somehow, Sleepless In Seattle achieves the remarkable (if not entirely satisfying) feat of having its cake (sugar enriched and coated in gooey icing) and eating it too. While its wit leans to the intellectual, Sleepless is powered by a heart of pure pulp, as if someone had crossed a sophisticated comedy with a Lassie adventure.

Ephron, still graduating from writer to director, is only truly confident during the talking scenes. Elsewhere, she conveys melancholy with too many shots of sorry faced movie stars gazing into the night, relying on a soundtrack of oldies to underscore the emotions. It is a tactic that soon begins to grate on the nerves. When Meg gets up in the middle of the night to potter aimlessly around, we hardly need Carly Simon trashing 'The Wee Small Hours Of The Morning' to tell us what she is thinking. This is simply MTV movie-making backdated to a pre rock 'n' roll era.

Yet, despite its many faults, Sleepless In Seattle entertains as it manipulates. Hanks and Ryan make an engaging Grant and Kerr for our times, lacking their sophistication but making up for it with sheer amiability and sly comic timing. To paraphrase Hanks, it's a chick's movie, but, in its peculiar combination of the cynical and the heartfelt, it promises to be the best thing to happen to movie dating since Ghost. Take someone you love, and a handkerchief. In fact, make that a box. But better leave the Nirvana album at home.