SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE is a Christmas classic. Tom Hanks, Ross Malinger and Meg Ryan each deliver pitch perfect performances as the widow, his son and the woman who hears him on the radio talking about his dead wife.
It's not a complicated script. There's no big twists or mystery to be solved. It's really just the simple story of two characters, Annie and Jonah, who go on quests to get what they want. Jonah wants his dad to be happy; Annie wants to find Sam.
I think Annie's story in particular is worth thinking about. In a nutshell, she keeps trying to get to Sam and keeps failing. She writes Sam a letter, then decides not to send it. The letter gets to him anyway, but then instead of reading it he goes on a date with someone--which Jonah then broadcasts on the radio show, as Annie listens. She goes to Seattle to meet him, but then at first is shy about it and just watches. And when she finally gets up the courage, she sees Sam hugging a woman and gives up. She goes back to her fiancé.
Jonah decides to meet her and sends her a letter to meet him at the Empire State Building. She doesn't go until it's too late and misses them. But (finally) the fact she went at all is enough--she turns to leave to find Sam and Jonah there.
Again, super simple as storylines go. But it demonstrates the power of a really basic principle well-executed: you want your protagonist to make choices, and you want those choices not to succeed but rather to complicate things further for the protagonist. So she goes to Seattle but then that means that she sees Sam with his sister and assumes the worst. Or she returns to Walter and as a result misses Sam and Jonah at the Empire State Building.
Note that even in her final choice, to go to the Empire State Building, complicates her life with another failure. When she gets there, they're not there. I love that the film does that, because it's true to her character. Annie acts but always with a little hesitation and as a result she fails.
And yet her meeting Sam and Jonah doesn't feel like a cheat, because Jonah has been a consistent arc of his own. Jonah is the one who gets his dad on the radio. He's the one who reads Annie's letter and tries to get his dad to read it. He's the one who goes back on the radio saying the woman his dad is dating is not right for him, which gets Annie on the plane to Seattle. He's the one who decides to fly to New York and tells Annie to meet him, which gets Sam on a plane to chase him and leads to Annie and Sam finally meeting.
There's probably lots of lessons to draw from SLEEPLESS. But the one I want to suggest is this: Keep it Simple and Keep it Consistent. You don't have to have a thousand bells and whistles or a mind-bending plot to succeed. You need one clear, clean story, and an arc that somehow involves the character doing the same thing over and over, and yet ends in a surprising way. That's the real sleight of hand.
