While I was binging romantic comedies in the week after Christmas, I revisited an old favorite, While You Were Sleeping. I hadn’t seen it in ages, and it was particularly interesting right after watching Four Weddings and a Funeral, since it was basically a rebuttal to the kind of relationships Four Weddings depicts. In fact, the whole movie is essentially an exploration of infatuation vs. love.

There will be spoilers, since it’s hard to discuss what makes the story work without giving away some of the twists, and I also want to discuss something that comes up at the end. The movie is currently on Disney+ if you haven’t seen it, and I do recommend it as one of the great rom-coms.

First, a quick summary: Lucy (a very young Sandra Bullock) works at an El station in Chicago and falls in love with Peter (Peter Gallagher), a handsome man she sees every day at the station. On Christmas morning, he gets mugged at the station. She manages to chase away the muggers, but Peter is injured and knocked onto the tracks. She saves him before he’s hit by a train, but he’s unconscious. When she follows the ambulance to the hospital and sighs, “I was going to marry him,” as he’s taken into the emergency room, a nurse gets the wrong idea and introduces Lucy to Peter’s family as his fiancee when they arrive. In all the chaos, she never manages to correct the misunderstanding, then when they invite her to their Christmas dinner, she’s so lonely and depressed that she can’t resist. But then Peter’s younger brother Jack (Bill Pullman) is suspicious because Lucy is not Peter’s type. While Peter’s in a coma, Jack sets out to figure out what’s going on with Lucy, which means spending time together and getting to know each other. That leads to them falling in love, but he thinks she’s engaged to his brother, and she’s afraid if she confesses the truth she’ll lose him and his family. Things get even more complicated when Peter comes out of the coma.

Lucy’s feelings for Peter are pretty much like all the relationships in Four Weddings. She sees him, likes the looks of him, and she considers that to be love. She knows absolutely nothing about him other than that he’s attractive, has a nice smile, and she notices he sometimes gives up his seat on the train. She’s never spoken to him at all. As the movie progresses, we see that Peter would be all wrong for her. She loves his big, loving Irish Catholic family, but he seems to have distanced himself enough from them that they’re not too surprised to learn he was engaged and they didn’t know (and they don’t know about the woman he’s actually engaged to). Lucy is warm and down-to-earth and Peter is cool and superficial. She loves the wooden furniture Jack makes, but Peter’s apartment is all glass and chrome. Late in the movie, we learn that even his slick nice-guy facade is a lie. He’s actually kind of a sleazy jerk, so not only is she wrong to think she’s in love with him, but she’s wrong about the kind of person she thinks he must be. She wouldn’t have been interested in him if she’d actually known him.

In contrast, her relationship with Jack looks more like the foundation for something that could be real love. They have long conversations in which they discuss their backgrounds and families, their current lives, and their hopes, dreams, and plans. They have similar values. They make each other laugh. She meets his family, with whom he’s close, and fits in well with them. They encourage each other to follow their dreams and do the things they’ve always wanted to do. I still think it’s early to consider it love, since they don’t even know each other for two weeks during the course of the movie, but in rom-com time, that’s practically an eternity.

What I find interesting is that the movie never actually comes out and specifically addresses this thesis. It’s all show vs. tell, strictly showing and never telling. The audience sees the interactions between Lucy and Jack and later between Lucy and Peter and we learn about Peter and how wrong about him she was because she knew nothing about him. But no one ever says, “I guess that was just infatuation but this is real love.”

The other thing that’s an interesting contrast to Four Weddings and even more so to Love Actually is the way they deal with falling in love with a person who’s in a committed relationship. Movies so often have this attitude that every thought or feeling must be expressed, so if you’re in love with someone, you have to tell them, even if they’re engaged or even married, or else you’ll regret it. Showing up at someone’s wedding to tell them you love them is perfectly okay — and screenwriters seem to have taken that as the ultimate ticking clock and raised stakes. I think this is terrible. Someone who would dump someone else just because you expressed your interest has all kinds of red flags. If you’re in a relationship and you’d leave that person if you found out that another person was interested and available, then you’re not very committed to the relationship you’re in. A person should stay in or leave a relationship on the merits of that relationship/person, not because of whether or not another person they might like better becomes available.

Besides, it’s a real jerk move to put the moves on someone who’s involved with someone else, especially if they’re involved with your friend or family member. This was something that came up in the Cinema Therapy episode about Love Actually, in which the marriage therapist mentioned that the guy who showed up with the signs to tell his best friend’s wife that he loves her because you’re supposed to tell the truth at Christmas was putting the wife in a terrible position. If she tells her husband about this, then she’s going to put a rift between him and his best friend, but if she doesn’t tell, then it puts a rift between her and her husband because she’s hiding something from him, and if the truth ever comes out then he has reason to feel somewhat betrayed, since he’ll likely have been hanging out with his wife and friend, not knowing that his friend has feelings for his wife that she’s aware of.

In While You Were Sleeping, this kind of situation comes up, and he doesn’t tell her how he feels. Peter comes out of his coma and doesn’t remember being engaged to Lucy, though she is familiar to him, so he thinks he has amnesia. The family friend who knows the truth about Lucy but doesn’t know about Jack and Lucy gets the idea to resolve everything by convincing Peter to propose to Lucy “all over again” and marry her. On the eve of the wedding, Jack asks Lucy if she’s really going to go through with it, and she asks him if there’s a reason she shouldn’t. Clearly, she wants him to tell her not to marry his brother because he loves her, but he doesn’t say anything, leaving her hurt and thinking he doesn’t want her. But, really, that’s a copout on her part. She wants an excuse not to have to marry Peter, but it’s up to her to make that decision based on how she feels about Peter. She shouldn’t be factoring in whether or not Jack wants her. Since by this time Jack has come to believe Peter and Lucy really were engaged, he’d be a jerk to tell her not to marry his brother. And what does happen is that Lucy decides during the ceremony that she can’t go through with it and confesses all. Only then can she have a real relationship with Jack.

One thing I’ve always been impressed by with this movie is the way they make a fairly outrageous situation work. A general writing rule is that the more extreme an action you want a character to take, the stronger the motivation must be. You have to get the audience to the point of thinking they’d do the same thing in similar circumstances, or at least that they understand why the character did that thing. Pretending to be engaged to a total stranger in a coma is a pretty extreme action, and I think they do a good job of setting it up. It helps that the deception isn’t her idea. It’s a misunderstanding rather than a deliberate lie, and she does try to correct it, but no one listens to her, and then she quits trying to say anything when the grandmother has a heart episode. She’s planning to just slip away after leaving the hospital and not further the deception, but she’s so incredibly lonely, having recently lost her father and having no other family, that she can’t resist the thought of being part of a family Christmas. She’s not continuing the deception for any kind of gain. She just doesn’t want to be alone at Christmas, and she’s never had this kind of big family celebration. There’s a shot of her wistfully watching the family interact that totally sells it (and there’s definitely some future Oscar winner potential there — just thinking about the look on her face brings tears to my eyes). The neighbor/godfather/family friend knows about the deception, lets her know he knows, but endorses it as long as she doesn’t take advantage of the family. And it helps that Lucy is played by Sandra Bullock, in full “girl next door” mode, so you can’t help but like her and feel for her.

While You Were Sleeping passes my rom-com tests in that it has some genuinely funny moments and I actually like the couple and think they might be able to make it work. You can see why they like each other. You’d think that would be a bare minimum for a romantic comedy, but it’s surprising how many don’t meet this very low bar. More on that in the next post.