This Is the Year To Finally Accept 'While You Were Sleeping' As the Perfect Christmas Movie
Sorry to this man. This man being Bruce Willis. But Die Hard is getting knocked off its pedestal this year, losing its favorite unexpected Christmas movie status. Normally after a tough year I’d welcome a movie where the villain gets foiled by the quick-witted and unkillable hero who yells “Jesus Christ” enough to remind us that Die Hard is definitely a Christmas movie.
Every year we engage in the great “is this a Christmas movie” debate about numerous films—not just the John McClane epic. Sometimes it’s Gremlins or American Psycho or even Iron Man 3. We often label films with the “Christmas movie” moniker because the plot involves someone learning a lesson about love or gratitude, or because there’s Christmas trees included in the set dressing, or because a hero defeats a Grinch-like figure. Maybe that's why action movies tend to get this holiday consideration (is John Wick a Christmas movie? Makes you think).
But this year, the unexpected Christmas movie that we need the most is While You Were Sleeping. 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. It's an annual oversight that even bothers the film's director Jon Turteltaub.
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). And its commentary on needing family and love around the holidays strikes a particular chord in the age of COVID. 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. But—this year especially—it's time for WYWS to be widely and officially accepted into the canon of Christmas movie classics.
Lucy Eleanor Moderatz, Sandra Bullock’s character in While You Were Sleeping, is introduced as a dreamer, a romantic. 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.
She imagines a relationship that would mirror the love her parents shared, as told to her with great frequency and fairy tale-esque panache by her father prior to his passing. Lucy’s isolation is threefold. She’s without family, without a romantic partner, and because of this, her employer considers her the go-to person (Lucy is today’s standard of an essential worker!) to work on all holidays. She can’t even get the hot dog vendor to remember her daily lunch order like he does for her co-workers. This all abruptly changes on Christmas day when she rescues her crush (Peter Callaghan) from a mugging. A standard rom-com-style misunderstanding at the hospital leads the whole panicky and boisterous (yet warm and delightful) Callaghan clan to embrace Lucy as their comatose son’s fiancee along with being his savior.
The first time I saw this movie I had barely experienced a first kiss. 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. I immediately loved the movie and Lucy.
It was the '90s. Rom-coms were plentiful and the awkward heroine always emerged triumphant in the end, but Lucy was different. There was no makeover. There was no close-knit group of friends to dissect the behavior of crushes or possible partners or talk about her loneliness. It was just Lucy navigating it all on her own. I feel like this year we’ve all been Lucy to some extent. Dreaming of being with our families and/or friends and wishing we could get a stamp in our passport. 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.
After 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. But sitting alone eating a makeshift Thanksgiving dinner while my dog napped nearby on the couch set me straight. 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. Watching the movie the weekend after Thanksgiving, everything about being alone this year felt amplified. Lucy’s loneliness feels even more palpable. For me right now, the movie manages to balance acknowledgment and escapism of the present moment. It underlines all the things I’m desperately missing this year, but also works as a balm providing that sought after happy ending. 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’s everything she desperately wants but she’s tentative as she watches because she knows this family isn’t hers to keep. 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. 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. 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. Leaning involves *wanting*... and *accepting*. *Leaning*
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. 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. Lucy 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. Meanwhile, the rest of the family all shout over each other about everything from Argentina having good beef, Dustin Hoffman being 5’6”, to Jack saying his romantic preference is chubby blondes. The texture of the mashed potatoes, the varied heights of Hollywood leading men and where Lucy might go on her purported honeymoon all meld together in this perfect cacophony of different personalities at the dinner table and it’s a reminder of another thing I looked forward to when the pandemic subsides.
Although initially caused by a misunderstanding, Lucy’s loneliness is the driving force behind keeping up the charade of acting the role of Peter’s fiancee. The need to care for people and feel connected to people who care about her in return is a powerful force. We’ve been looking for ways to survive the emotional toll that sequestering ourselves has taken. That’s why While You Were Sleeping should be the Christmas movie at the top of every must watch list this year. It’s not only immensely quotable (“I don’t drink anymore...I don’t drink any less either!”) but it’s a reminder that it’s ok to admit that we’re lonely at this strange time. It’s ok to fantasize about a future that’s full of reuniting with loving family and friends while we remain unsure about the when of it all. The grief Lucy lives with every day since her father passed away is not dissimilar to what many of us have experienced this year. 2020 has been a year of grief not only due to losing loved ones but the overall loss of normalcy. And it feels like when Lucy meets Jack, it’s the first time she’s been able to share the pain she’s been harboring all on her own.
This year it feels emblematic of the social isolation we’ve all been subjected to. The movie resonates as we delve into the last month of the year, a time that’s usually filled with parties and get-togethers, maybe some clandestine kisses under the mistletoe. The pandemic has robbed us of any sense of joie de vivre this holiday season and for most of this year impacted our mental health. But watching this movie makes me feel hopeful. Lucy’s hope to find that perfect love and loving family and no longer feel lonely makes me wish a positive change in our collective circumstances is coming. And at the very least we ourselves can hope that this time next year we not only will be back to hugging as much as ever, but also leaning. Which everyone knows requires just as much close proximity, but is *completely* different than hugging. I want to live in a world where we can have both in equal measure, in honor of the well-known classic Christmas movie, While You Were Sleeping.
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