When I first saw While You Were Sleeping, way back in 1995, I saw it, more than once because I found it, quite simply, a lot of fun and, I am pretty sure, I had a crush on Sandra Bullock. Revisiting it, recently, I am left wondering what I found so charming about the film. It tries hard to be clever but does not stand up as well as I remember it.

Bullock is Lucy, a Chicago transit employee with a crush on a stranger whom she rescues on Christmas Day. He ends up in a coma and she is, somehow, mistaken for his fiancée. His family takes her in and treats her as one of their own. As a lonely, underappreciated, um, lonely person, Lucy excepts their hospitality and falls for the stranger’s brother. It is kind of creepy what she does to the family looking at it now. The cast is uniformly strong but they are a whole bunch of quirks that live together. It just doesn’t quite work for me now and I can’t really explain why.