When Harry Met Sally…
Here she comes again…
ASSUMING SUCH PEOPLE EXIST, even those who’ve never seen Rob Reiner’s 1989 romcom benchmark know this is the one with the fake orgasm and the Woody Allen fixation. And those people are right, to a point.
But there’s more to the brief-turning-long encounters between Billy Crystal’s horny Harry Burns and Meg Ryan’s sensitive Sally than this reputation suggests. Sure, Allen-isms linger in the titles, in the jazzy music, the Casablanca references, the New York fetish and the study of romantic mores. But when Harry meets Sally on a cross-country trek in 1977, she mocks his belief that an obsession with death makes him deep… and a lighter, brighter version of Allen’s playfield unfolds.
The ending is a shoo-in but it’s none the worse for it when the path there is plotted with charm, nuance and Nora Ephron’s crisp, compressed scripting. The talking-point claim that men and women can’t actually be friends (because: sex) seems well-worn now, but it hardly matters because Harry/Sally’s positions shift subtly over their years-on meetings. Thirty-something melancholy creeps in, judiciously eased by the way they gradually grow into each other, turning into the lifers in the talking-heads interludes.
Despite their chalk/cheese coupling, Crystal and Ryan manage to make us believe (and care) that they do, helped by the docu-like way of framing the film’s vignettes with life in motion around them: the ball-game bit is a keeper, while Bruno Kirby and Carrie Fisher are convincing as our leads’ lived-in friends.
Ephron’s influence itself is now well lived-in on film and TV, from suds-coms ( Friends) to gently lewd, playfully predictable on/off/on romances (Richard Curtis, Bridget Jones...). But her breezy sweetener hasn’t aged much and the copycats prove it has distinction. Basically, the Allen copycat spawned its own litter. We’ll still have what she’s having. Kevin Harley