Rob Reiner (1989)
Well, I’ve seen this famous romcom at long last and I watched it through increasingly clenched teeth. The title characters first meet in 1977, when both have just graduated from the University of Chicago. They can barely stand each other’s company on the car drive they share from Chicago to New York City, where Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) has a job lined up and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) will start a college course in journalism. Their tetchy conversation on the road introduces the subject of debate that persists throughout Rob Reiner’s film: can a man and a woman ever be good friends – or will sex always get in the way of friendship? Sally says yes to the first question, Harry to the second. In 1982 they coincide in an airport lounge then on a plane flight. By now, Sally’s a magazine journalist and dating one of Harry’s pals; Harry, a ‘political consultant’, is not only engaged to be married but has also changed his mind on the men-and-women friendship issue. Another five years later, he and Sally happen to meet in a New York bookstore, discuss their respective failed romances and decide to try being friends. It works until, at some point in 1988, sex does indeed, and unexpectedly, get in the way (it happens when Harry goes round to her apartment to comfort Sally, who’s reeling from the news that her ex is about to tie the knot with someone else). Following a morning-after bust-up, Sally calls their friendship off. In a crowd but alone at a party to see in New Year 1989, she’s missing Harry, when he suddenly appears to list all the reasons why he loves her. They get married.
Two people refusing or failing to see, for as long as humanly possible, that they’re made for each other, is the bedrock of romantic comedy. The inevitability that the scales will fall from their eyes at the eleventh hour is an essential delight of the genre. It’s no problem at all, then, that you know just where Nora Ephron’s script, replete with smart one-liners, is heading. What’s vexing about When Harry Met Sally is that Rob Reiner’s treatment of the material is so relentlessly slick. There can be pleasure, of course, in watching a piece of precision engineering on screen – but only if there’s some emotional substance to complement this. You don’t get that in this film in either the direction or the lead performances – not enough anyway to divert attention from the underlying clockwork.
I’m not suggesting this is what Reiner intended. Working with a screenplay full of genre tropes, he may have been looking for a kind of distillation of vintage Hollywood romcoms. One seeming clue is in the choice of music. A roguish instrumental of ‘It Had To Be You’, arranged by Harry Connick Jr, plays over the opening credits. In the course of the film, there are plenty more standards, or snatches of them, voiced by the likes of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles and Bing Crosby, culminating in a reprise of ‘It Had To Be You’ sung by Frank Sinatra. But this Great-American-Songbook approach to soundtrack, rather than elevating the movie to the same ‘classic’ level of the numbers and their interpreters, points up When Harry Met Sally‘s synthetic quality (Harry Connick Jr’s arrangements reinforce that). Reiner’s involvement in the project began not long after his first marriage, to Penny Marshall, ended. He’s the son of a show-business marriage of famous longevity: when this film was made, Carl and Estelle Reiner had already been married approaching fifty years and they stayed married until Estelle died in 2008. As if in tribute to his parents, Reiner punctuates the narrative with snippets of elderly married couples telling an unseen interviewer how they first met etc. The ‘documentary’ inserts are amusing enough (not least as a light-hearted echo of the aged witnesses in Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981)) but even these bits are performed (the ‘real’ oldies are actually actors). The last such interviewees, needless to say, are Harry and Sally, reminiscing about their wedding day.
A striking feature – and a surprising one, in view of the cachet When Harry Met Sally has acquired over the years – is how much Reiner and Nora Ephron borrow from Woody Allen, from the introductory music onwards (though Allen’s music choices, for all that they’ve become nearly a cliché in his work, always seem also an expression of his individuality). These borrowings are shallow, though. Harry’s mixture of pessimism and romanticism suggests a protagonist who’s Woody-like. But also Woody-lite: the morbid thoughts Harry proclaims during the opening car journey are a stuck-on feature – he’s nowhere near a thoroughgoing neurotic. This is almost acknowledged in one of Ephron’s best lines when, later on, Harry declares that he’s ‘coming down with something … probably one of those 24-hour tumours’. The finale sees Harry running along a New York street on a mission of declaring his true feelings to the girl he loves – as the Allen character does in Manhattan (1979), although the result there isn’t an unequivocally happy ending.
It’s nice – as well as apt, given Reiner’s old-couples device – to see from Wikipedia that Billy Crystal’s marriage in 1970, to his high-school sweetheart, is now in its fifty-fourth year. No surprise that Crystal is comically dexterous as Harry – and likeable, though he’s not strong enough to escape the bland straitjacket of When Harry Met Sally. It’s Meg Ryan who embodies the film’s most grating aspects. She’s technically accomplished – she has more emotional and vocal variety than Crystal – yet infuriatingly smug and hollow. The fake-orgasm-in-the-deli scene – which succeeds chiefly thanks to the ‘I’ll have what she’s having’ punchline, delivered by Estelle Reiner, in her cameo as a diner at a nearby table – made Meg Ryan a star. I have to say I’m relieved her star faded some time ago now. Each of Sally and Harry has a confidante – hers is Marie (Carrie Fisher), his is Jess (Bruno Kirby). At one point, the two leads match-make with the help of these friends: Harry tries to pair Sally up with Jess, Sally to pair Harry up with Marie. The attempt is a complete failure except that Marie and Jess instantly hit it off and soon get married. This minor couple realises straight away that they’re made for each other. When they dash off from the restaurant where the foursome has met to get into a yellow cab together, it’s the funniest, most enjoyable moment in the whole picture. Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby aren’t given much to do but they do enough to make you sorry we got the protagonists we did, rather than ‘When Jess Met Marie’.
6 April 2024
