When a Man Loves a Woman

There are a few good things to be said about When a Man Loves a Woman. Now that the movie is released, we don't have to watch the lousy preview trailer anymore (it's been playing since last September). It's also nice to see Andy Garcia play something other than a street-wise ethnic type. Instead, he gets to play a upper-middle-class anal retentive type.

But good performances by Garcia and Meg Ryan are When a Man Loves a Woman's only real merits. This rehab drama about an alcoholic mother lacks the hard grittiness of The Lost Weekend and the emotional resonance of The Days of Wine and Roses. You don't even see much drinking, despite the fact that Ryan's supposed to be on a protracted binge. She simply shows up drunk. It must be magic.

Which is indicative of what's wrong with this movie. It refuses to delve into any of the reasons why Ryan drinks, or why Garcia's such a model of co-dependency. It also refuses to unload on Garcia's character, even though he plays a husband who's clearly a controlling jerk. Everything in When a Man Loves a Woman is cookie-cutter clean – which does a disservice to families that are dealing with the hard realities of alcoholism and recovery. But mostly, it's just a drag.

Sleepless In Seattle

The so-called "women's movie" used to be one of the most commercially reliable forms of Hollywood film­making.

Granted, the term was originally coined with a distinctly contemptuous tone. But the films always made money, while provid­ing a boom for the paper-hankie industry. And women weren't the only audience members secretly weeping into those han­kies — men simply wouldn't admit to it.

Oddly enough, the women's film started to fade from the screen about the same time the Western began to vanish. Neither the "weepies" nor the "cowboys" made it through the '70s intact. It was as if the exclusive men's club of the Western genre needed that feminine counter­point to survive.

Now, they're both back. Eastwood has reinvented the Western. With Sleepless in Seat­tle, writer-director Nora Ephron recasts the romantic weepie for the post-Ms, maga­zine generation.

Sleepless in Seattle asks the eternal movie question: is love a form of chance, destiny or simple neurosis? It never answers its own question, but it does have a nice time kick­ing the issue around.

Tom Hanks plays a bereaved widower whose depressed lifestyle drives is eight-year-old son to a phone-in radio talk show for help. Meg Ryan is the woman reporter who hears the show while driving to meet her boring fiancee. Naturally, she instantly falls in love with Hank's voice. The only problem is that Hanks lives in Seattle, and she lives in Baltimore. Seemingly, they are doomed to be forever separated by all of the large, square-shaped states in the middle.

Fortunately, eight-year-old kids are always capable of solving adults' prob­lems. Even better, Nora Ephron doesn't take her movie plot too seriously.

What Ephron does take seriously is clever dialogue and well-placed musical references in soundtracks. She also has good instincts for the emotional pull of the genre. Ephron realizes that the audience knows better than to fall for this kind of movie. She also knows that the allure of the romantic weepie (and, by the way, actu­ally a comedy) is virtually irre­sistible.

Ephron is no slouch in delivering the goods. Sleepless in Seattle has a sharp sense of humor — its characters debate the very cliches they are tum­bling into. As she previously demonstrated in her scripts for Heartburn and When Harry Met Sally, Ephron has a good writer's ear for witty, natural lines.

Throughout Sleepless in Seat­tle, the characters consult the 1957 film An Affair to Remember. It's the quintessential romantic weepie. It's obvious, manipulative and com­pulsively watchable. In many ways, so is Sleepless in Seattle.

Just bring your own hankies.