Thirty years ago this month, I sat in a suburban movie house and watched America’s sweetheart stumble backward into love. No, the picture wasn’t Pretty Woman, Sleepless in Seattle, or You’ve Got Mail, though those 1990s classics deserve columns of their own. Rather, it was a film that nearly fell apart before it could be made — an arch-reactionary romance whose politics, incredibly, feel newly relevant today.
Few critical platitudes are mustier than the complaint, “They don’t make ’em like that anymore.” But in this case, they really don’t. Indeed, While You Were Sleeping might seem a strange candidate for the full “retrospective” treatment. Though well-received upon its April 1995 release, the film secured no Oscar nominations and locked up only one Golden Globe nod for
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