1/6/2024 0 Comments While you were sleepingLucy and Jack barely speak, mainly sharing looks with each other, silently sharing in the hilarity and telegraphing every emotion I feel watching it as a viewer. If, like me, you’re missing the spirited talks around the dinner table with family and friends, the dialogue in that particular scene is like verbal choreography. The other thing the movie offers up in spades is the ridiculousness of a family dinner scene where no less than five (I counted!) conversations are happening at the same time. It really comes to fruition when Jack, with a small assist from Joe Fusco Jr., explains to Lucy the difference between hugging someone and leaning toward them. And there’s so much romance! The chemistry between Sandra Bullock and Bill Pullman (who plays Jack Callaghan, Peter’s brother! Such scandal!), starts off as a slow simmer as they share a long walk home and starts to really take off when they both valiantly try not to slip on a patch of ice by clutching onto each other. For me it’s everything I want to be doing, hugging family, laughing and just spending time sitting together on a couch but knowing it may well be another full year before that’s a reality again. It’s everything she desperately wants but she’s tentative as she watches because she knows this family isn’t hers to keep. There’s so much longing in Lucy’s eyes as she sits by the fireplace looking around at the Callaghan family bantering with each other and passing out gifts while exclaiming over the contents. It underlines all the things I’m desperately missing this year, but also works as a balm providing that sought after happy ending. For me right now, the movie manages to balance acknowledgment and escapism of the present moment. Lucy’s loneliness feels even more palpable. Watching the movie the weekend after Thanksgiving, everything about being alone this year felt amplified. I felt like Lucy when she’s alone contemplating her sad bland TV dinner and dunking an Oreo into her cat’s bowl of milk. But sitting alone eating a makeshift Thanksgiving dinner while my dog napped nearby on the couch set me straight. Maybe the only silver lining to the pandemic is that While You Were Sleeping can now officially get the Christmas movie status it so rightfully deserves.Īfter so many months of being out of a job, not seeing friends or most of my family, I truly believed I was ready to face the holidays on my own this year. Dreaming of being with our families and/or friends and wishing we could get a stamp in our passport. I feel like this year we’ve all been Lucy to some extent. It was just Lucy navigating it all on her own. There was no close-knit group of friends to dissect the behavior of crushes or possible partners or talk about her loneliness. Rom-coms were plentiful and the awkward heroine always emerged triumphant in the end, but Lucy was different. While nervously talking to my crush in a Friendly’s parking lot, he had leaned in and I reflexively stepped back, stumbling backwards off the curb and falling on my ass while somehow still calmly asking him, “have you read Jurassic Park? It’s a really good book.” Needless to say I was at the beginning of embarking on my own romantic fantasies, where I’d imagine all sorts of scenarios of being smooth and casual and everything may not be perfect, but I wouldn’t fall off a curb shouting about the written works of Michael Crichton. The first time I saw this movie I had barely experienced a first kiss. She's all alone in the world, but she fantasizes about the perfect relationship, and a life of adventure as she takes tokens all day as a transit worker. Lucy Eleanor Moderatz, Sandra Bullock’s character in While You Were Sleeping, is introduced as a dreamer, a romantic. But-this year especially-it's time for WYWS to be widely and officially accepted into the canon of Christmas movie classics. Twenty-five years ago this movie held up the reality of loneliness this time of year and magnified the most human of emotional needs through the lens of a perfect romantic comedy in a way that’s still relevant today. And its commentary on needing family and love around the holidays strikes a particular chord in the age of COVID. While You Were Sleeping is gentle, it’s funny, there’s no blood and gore (minus the whole losing a testicle incident but we don’t actually SEE it so it’s fine). It's an annual oversight that even bothers the film's director Jon Turteltaub. It's a story that opens right before Christmas and ends a day or two after New Year’s Eve-and yet it's rarely included in most holiday movie watch lists. Patrick Swayze Was the First Man I Ever Lovedīut this year, the unexpected Christmas movie that we need the most is While You Were Sleeping.
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