Many of my friends from high school and college, and whom I still keep up with, are women. I find it easier to relate to them, and easier to talk to them. So the idea of a movie whose professed message is, “Men and women can’t be friends” would, at first glance, seem like something that would be anathema to me. And yet Rob Reiner’s When Harry Met Sally…, written by Nora Ephron, is a terrific and funny romantic comedy even if you don’t agree with that message.
Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) first meet in Chicago in 1977 when she drives him from Chicago to New York City (her best friend Amanda (Michelle Necastro) is Harry’s current girlfriend), where he’s getting work as a journalist, and she plans to be a political consultant. She’s turned off by his lack of manners (he spits grape seeds into her car window without checking to see if it’s open first) and his life view (he’s so obsessed with death, he reads the last page of any novel he reads first, so if he dies, he’ll know how the book ends). He’s bemused by her food ordering habits (she’s very much into ordering things on the side) and the way she plans out everything to the last detail. They argue about the ending of Casablanca (he thinks Ilsa really wants to stay, and only leaves because Rick put her on the plane, while she thinks Ilsa really did want to go with Victor). Despite everything, Harry makes a pass at Sally, which disgusts her even more. This is when Harry comes up with the idea that “Men and women can’t be friends”, because according to him, sex always gets in the way. So, when she drops him off at Washington Square Park in New York City, they assume they will never see each other again.
Five years later, Harry walks by when Sally is saying goodbye to Joe (Steven Ford), her current boyfriend, at the airport. He pretends not to recognize her (instead, he greets Joe), but when they’re both on the plane, he talks to her after she orders something on the side from the flight attendant (the person next to Sally even offers to switch seats with Harry). He reveals he’s engaged to be married, while she says her relationship with Joe is good. He offers to take her out to dinner, she reminds him what he said about men and women not being able to be friends, and while he denies saying it at first, he admits saying it, tries to make an exception when the man and woman in question are each involved with other people, but then realizes that doesn’t work either. Once again, they go their separate ways.
Five years later, Harry and Sally are both living in New York City, but their circumstances have changed. Sally has broken up with Joe because she’s realized what she saw as their carefree relationship (having no kids, not getting married) really wasn’t making them happy, nor was it that carefree. Harry, meanwhile, has gotten divorced, and as he tells his friend Jess (Bruno Kirby), he’s found out his ex has been seeing another man. They run into each other in a bookstore (while Sally is with her friend Marie (Carrie Fisher)), tell each other about their situations, and, slowly, tentatively, start to become friends. But are they actually becoming more than that?
One rule I have about any genre movie, including romantic comedies, is if it fulfills the requirements of that genre, I’m willing to forgive quite a lot. There are other things for me to forgive in Reiner and Ephron’s movie aside from the central message of “Men and women can’t be friends”. Like many other comedies at the time, and afterwards, we don’t really see any of the characters work, and their jobs are only referred to a couple of times; when they tell each other, and when, while Harry, Marie, Jess, and Sally are on a double date, Marie ends up quoting something from a column Jess wrote, which leads the two of them to fall in love and eventually marry. Also, while only Woody Allen movies up till then were using standards as movie scores, as that’s the music he mostly only likes (this movie was heavily influenced by Allen’s movies like Annie Hall), the success of Reiner’s movie, as well as Harry Connick Jr’s recordings of standards for the film’s score (there are a few original recordings of standards as well) led every many other romantic comedies, or dramas, to assume they had to use standards for their music, not because it was organic to the movie, but just because. Finally, on the face of it, Harry and Sally as characters seem overly schematic upon first glance. Nevertheless, as I said, if a romantic comedy is both romantic and funny, I will forgive a lot, and Reiner and Ephron make this both romantic and funny.
Obviously, the scene most people remember from this movie is the scene where Sally, trying to convince it’s possible one of the women Harry slept with might have faked an orgasm with him, fakes one in public when they’re having lunch at Katz’s Deli, and it remains as hilarious today, after rewatching it several times, as it was when I first saw the movie the summer before my senior year at Gonzaga (there were three women sitting behind me in the theater, and I thought all four of us were going to die laughing).* As funny as that scene is, however, it’s not the only funny part of the movie. The humor of the movie comes through the characters and how they react to each other and the situations they get into, from the way Sally orders (inspired by how Ephron ordered food in real life; when Reiner saw her ordering like this when they went out to lunch, he convinced Ephron to give that aspect to Sally), to Harry’s depressed view of life (which comes from how Reiner felt at the time the script was being developed). Even the scene where Harry, after finding out his ex-wife is getting re-married, takes his anger about that out on Jess and Marie, goes to funny places. At the same time, while I’ve often felt Ephron only goes to a very superficial level with her stories and her characters, that’s not the case here, as we really get the anger underneath both characters, as well as their unhappiness. Yet, that doesn’t take away from the comedy – Sally comforts Harry after a woman he went on a date with reminded him of his ex-wife, until she finds out he still slept with the woman – and nor does it take away from the romance. The climax, when Harry declares himself to Sally, works not just because of the sharpness of the writing – Harry tells Sally he loves her for all of her faults, which he lists, and Sally tearfully tells Harry she hates him – but because the relationship between them during the entire movie has built to that moment.
Barry Sonnenfeld shot the movie, and he doesn’t overwhelm the movie with showy cinematography, but makes the city look beautiful. At the same time, he frames the actors in just the right way, as in the scene on the airplane when Harry peers behind Sally’s seat after overhearing her place her drink order. As I mentioned above, while the use of standards in romantic movies has become a cliché, Reiner makes it work here, as the ones he does use (Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald’s recordings of “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” and “Our Love is Here to Stay”, Ray Charles’ recording of “Winter Wonderland”) haven’t become stale from overuse. And the cast members make it work. While Fisher and Kirby are very good in supporting roles, the movie depends on Crystal and Ryan, and they come through in spades. In later comedies, especially those directed by Ephron, Ryan would rely too much on tics and mannerisms, but here, she plays Sally’s eccentricities as normal instead of affected (even the scene where she’s putting envelopes in a mailbox one at a time, driving Harry crazy). Crystal, in turn, in movies often relies too often on the easy one-liner, but the one-liners here are funny (as when he’s discussing the difference between “high maintenance” and “low maintenance”), and digs deep into Harry’s anger. Even if, as I said before, I think men and woman can, and should, be friends, I also think When Harry Met Sally… remains a terrific romantic comedy.
*-On the DVD commentary, Reiner confirmed what I’d long suspected; the montage of scenes of Christmas time in NYC, before we get to Harry helping Sally take a Christmas tree to her apartment, was put in after the deli scene so audience members would have time to recover from having laughed so hard.
