Every Tom Hanks And Meg Ryan Movie, Ranked By Rom-Com Die-Hards
When it comes to romantic comedies, few onscreen couples are as formidable as Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Audiences have enjoyed watching these two pretend to fall in love with each other so much that they’ve done it in three different films: 1990’s Joe Versus the Volcano, 1993’s Sleepless in Seattle, and 1998’s You’ve Got Mail.
Of course, true Hanks/Ryan fans would be upset if we omitted the other time when they played an onscreen couple, 2015’s Ithaca, in which Ryan plays a widower who sees visions of her deceased husband, played by Hanks. For obvious reasons that one doesn’t quite fall into the same category as the other three.
Now it’s time to determine which of Hanks and Ryan’s movies is the best.
- 140 VOTESPhoto: TriStar Pictures
What It’s About: Sleepless in Seattle is a love story from afar. Hanks plays Sam, a recent Seattle transplant, widower and father of 8-year-old Jonah, who persuades Sam to go on a national radio show and bare his soul about losing his wife. Many women develop feelings for him, among them Ryan’s Annie, who lives in Baltimore. Inspired by the 1957 film An Affair to Remember, Annie writes Sam a letter inviting him to meet at the Empire State Building the following Valentine’s Day. The two go about their lives and date the wrong people, but Annie’s interest in Sam deepens after she hires a detective who locates him in Seattle and heads there to… is there a more romantic word for “spy”? That’s what this is. From there, both eventually realize they have feelings for each other from a distance and keep the Valentine’s Day appointment.
How It Shows Off Their Chemistry: Sleepless in Seattle throws the audience a curveball by giving Ryan and Hanks almost no screen time together, instead spending time developing each of their characters individually. What you get is a career woman who’s cynical about traditional ideas of love, just like the movie is, and a devoted father who’s capable of love but not sure if he’s ready to pursue it again. This way, the film spends two hours essentially explaining why Sam and Annie are good for each other, so that by the time they do get together, you’ve already been rooting for it.
Memorable Moment: While Hanks and Ryan are the stars, Hanks’s future wife Rita Wilson steals a scene as Sam’s sister Suzy, who gives Sam, Jonah, and her husband an emotional retelling of the final sequence in An Affair to Remember, validating the pursuit of love, which is both funny and doubles as Sleepless in Seattle’s thesis.
Critical Reception: It’s relatively unusual for a rom-com to land one Academy Award nomination, much less multiple, but Sleepless in Seattle did just that with nominations for best original screenplay and best score. But the reason the movie works is because it accomplishes what it sets out to do. Director and screenwriter Nora Ephron wanted her movie to be both a commentary on the contrivances of rom-come as well as a successful rom-com in its own right. As she put it to Rolling Stone, “We’re trying to have our cake and eat it too. We’re trying to be smart, sophisticated, and funny about movies like this, but we want to be one too.”
It worked. In his review Roger Ebert wrote that it’s "as ephemeral as a talk show, as contrived as the late show, and yet so warm and gentle I smiled the whole way through.”
- 226 VOTESPhoto: Warner Bros. Pictures
What It’s About: Tom Hanks plays Joe, a depressed ex-firefighter and office drone who gets diagnosed with a supposedly fatal condition called “brain cloud,” giving him six months to live. His employer, a conglomerate that makes semiconductors among other things, just so happens to need someone with a short amount of time left: a Pacific Island indigenous tribe lives on the land where the company mines materials to make semiconductors, but needs a volunteer to appease their volcano god via a once-a-century human sacrifice. Joe’s boss’ daughter Patricia (played by Ryan, who also plays Patricia’s twin sister Angelica as well as Joe’s coworker DeDe, whom he has a crush on) agrees to take him to the island, and sure enough, a series of mishaps leads to them falling in love. Patricia eventually refuses to let Joe be sacrificed alone and jumps into the volcano with him, only for it to erupt and blow them away to safety, and a happily ever after. Also, Joe's “fatal illness” turns out to have been a ruse concocted by Patricia’s dad.
How It Shows Off Their Chemistry: Joe Versus the Volcano uses the time honored rom-com tradition of putting its two romantic leads in life-or-death situations, like a desert island shipwreck and a ritualistic human sacrifice, and seeing them bond and eventually fall for each other over it. Beyond that, the film’s choice to use Ryan in three roles pays off because it lets the two performers showcase three completely different kinds of romantic scenarios: Joe and DeDe like each other but she’s not ready for commitment; Joe and Angelica don’t hit it off; and Joe and Patricia finally do.
Memorable Moment: While the film’s climax, in which Patricia jumps into the volcano with Joe, unwilling to live without him, is plenty memorable, the film’s shipwreck sequence is the strongest. While Patricia is unconscious for days, Joe keeps her alive by feeding her capfuls of the small amount of water they have, going insane from dehydration in the process. It functions as a romantic montage complete with the Ink Spots’ “I Cover the Waterfront” playing over it, and it shows them falling in love - not easy to pull off when one of your two romantic leads is knocked out.
Critical Reception: Joe Versus the Volcano isn’t highly rated, with just a 67% Fresh rating among the critics and a 54% rating among fans on Rotten Tomatoes, and it’s considered one of the lesser entries in Hanks’ oeuvre. However, it does have its defenders, and elements of the film have been compared with Terry Gillian’s Brazil, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, and the works of Jacques Tati.
- 336 VOTESPhoto: Warner Bros. Pictures
What It’s About: This time, Hanks and Ryan play online romantic pen pals who are unaware they are also real life professional rivals. Hanks plays Joe, the owner of a large bookstore chain that’s trying to put Ryan’s Kathleen’s independent store, The Shop Around the Corner, out of business. Joe is the first to realize the truth about their situation and even though Kathleen is forced to close her store, the two work past their professional animosity and develop feelings for each other.
How It Shows Off Their Chemistry: Like Sleepless in Seattle five years before, You’ve Got Mail toys with audiences’ expectations. Many romantic comedies are about two characters who dislike each other but come to love each other. This one is about two characters who hate and love each other at the same time without even realizing it. This lets Hanks and Ryan play completely different emotional states in each scene and makes the final payoff totally worth it.
Memorable Moment: It’s pretty hard to beat the ending, when Kathleen cools Joe’s romantic overtures until she meets her online paramour in person, only to find out it’s Joe anyway. Ryan delivers an all-time classic line: “I wanted it to be you. I wanted it to be you so badly.” Plus, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” plays over it. That checks off pretty much all the rom-com boxes.
Critical Reception: You’ve Got Mail might not be considered in quite the same tier as other all-time great romantic comedies, but it’s still 70% Fresh among critics and 73% Fresh among fans on Rotten Tomatoes. However, Washington Post critic Michael O'Sullivan wrote that You’ve Got Mail lacked much of the cynicism that Nora Ephron and her sister Delia were known for in their screenwriting.
