Setting Love’s Alarm Clock in ‘While You Were Sleeping’

In “While You Were Sleeping,” a likable but lonely young woman (Sandra Bullock) pretends she’s engaged to a handsome stranger (Peter Gallagher) whose life she saved, but while he’s in a coma, she falls in love with his brother (Bill Pullman). (Rated PG)

*

Happy. Sad. Happy. Sad.

That’s how 6-year-old Riley Cropper described this heartwarming, tear-jerking romantic comedy.

It’s true. Tucked in between the folds of a laugh-out-loud comedy of errors is a poignant tale of family loss and family need.

Lucy, a token taker for the Chicago Transit Authority who’s in her 20s, is always the one asked to work holidays because she’s the only one without a family. Her mother died when she was a child. She dropped out of college to work and pay her ill father’s hospital bills until he died.

From her booth, she develops a secret crush on a handsome lawyer, Peter Callaghan, and is the only one around to roll him to safety after punks push him onto the subway tracks.

At the hospital, when she looks at his comatose body and muses sadly to herself, “I was going to marry him,” a nurse overhears her, and the misunderstanding gets underway. She comes to adore Peter’s eccentric, close-knit family, whose members tend to argue in non sequiturs, and they’re happy that Peter has found a nice girl. The truth, it seems, would disappoint everybody.

Despite the complications, even a 6-year-old could appreciate the story, and Riley clapped along with the rest of the audience at the satisfying conclusion.

“It was good,” she said.

Amanda Smith, 13, said she liked the movie better than another recent romantic comedy, “Only You,” because the story was better. Unlike some other love stories, Lucy was clearly searching for something more than just a boyfriend or husband.

Said Amanda: “The part I liked is that she didn’t just find true love in the guy she liked, but she just loved the family too.”

In the movie, Lucy explains that when she’s with the Callaghans, she gets to be a daughter and a sister as well as a potential wife.

Along the way, there is also plenty of slapstick. Kids laughed along with adults at a cameo scene of a newsboy throwing a paper and falling off his bike. The nurse gets to perform one of the most dramatic faints in recent movie history.

The movie’s adult humor is mild enough for kids--Lucy’s neighbor has a shoe fetish, and Lucy “proves” she is Peter’s fiancee by her knowing (having stumbled upon the information) that one of his testicles was removed.

If there’s a message here, it could be that people need all kinds of love beyond the romantic kind. But Nathalia Trees, 8, came away feeling that people ought to help other people--especially if they fall on subway tracks.

In any case, she and the other kids awarded this movie an A.

Said Nathalia: “I thought it was a good movie.”