Rom Com Season: When Harry Met Sally (Dir Rob Reiner, 1h36m, 1989)

The year is 1984, and Rob Reiner has been divorced for three years, his relationship with his previous wife, Penny Marshall now weighs heavy on his mind as he sits and discusses it with friend, and fellow director/screenwriter Nora Ephron, and long-time friend and producer, Andrew Scheinman. Chief in their conversation is the single life, together with the nearly-relationships and flotsam and get sum of dating, and the next time they meet, Reiner brings an idea to the table; a film about two people's growing friendship, and how sex and their growing chemistry will affect it. Into this film, Ephron, Reiner, and Scheinman pour their experiences, Rob Reiner goes back to work directing superb coming of age films in the form of Stand by Me and The Princess Bride, and Ephron sets to work honing the screenplay.

What arrives in cinemas five years later, in the summer of 1989, is perhaps the single greatest romantic comedy of the 1980s; a tough call, given that this is the decade that also brings us Valley Girl (in which the legendary Nicolas Cage makes his first starring role), Say Anything (featuring perhaps the greatest cinematic shorthand for the entire medium, as John Cusack holds boom-box aloft), much of the oeuvre of the late John Hughes, Dirty Dancing, not to mention Reiner's own The Princess Bride and the aforementioned Splash!. Through twelve years (and three months) Reiner charts the friendship, and eventual relationship of Harry (Billy Crystal) and Sally (Meg Ryan), as the two fall in and out of friendship with each other, infuriate and console the other, and eventually, perhaps inevitably, fall for each other. But When Harry Met Sally is more than just a run-of-the-mill rom-com, in its wickedly funny, often eyebrow-raisingly doublehander between Crystal and Ryan's exquisite character portraits of the middle American every-man (and woman) negotiating the complex world of friend-and relation-ships.

We are introduced to Harry and Sally at the beginning of their friendship-or, indeed, before it, as the duo car-share post-graduation, across the 16 hour trip between Chicago and New York (in perhaps one of its greatest cinematic appearances-cum-backdrops since Manhattan). They, needless to say, begin to get on each other's nerves, Harry belittling her "writing about each other people", and inflicting his dark sense of humour on her, whilst Sally finds his belief that men and women cannot be friends with each other-practically the undercurrent that pulls the entire film forward, risible. It's something that brilliantly juxtaposes the two personalities, the acerbic and often bluntly outspoken, but ultimately lonely Harry, to the charming, if fussy and sensitive, Sally-and ultimately sets them on a collision course.

The film, undeniably, delineates itself from the rest of the pack at this point-When Harry Met is a world away from heady teen romance; hell, what other rom-com of the period features this much falling in and out of love, or indeed, divorces? This clash of ideals, this idea that male-female friendships are impossible, as "the sex part gets in the way" is a smartly done set of sequences, their animosity flowing this way and that throughout their trip, their argument slowly building as they snipe back and forth, before it comes to a head at the dinner table, the two rowing at a diner that the other is wrong. It's not the last time the film uses this everyday location as a backdrop to their arguments, often at the detriment to their overall friendship, but it is certainly the one that most highlights that great divide between the two of them. Their trip complete, they split in New York, agreeing never to see each other again.

We cut to five years later. There's something intriguing about When Harry Met Sally's staging-it's hardly surprising that 2004 would bring a stage adaption starring the late Luke Perry-but moreover, it is a romance film that essentially drops in on its chief protagonists only at their individual meetings with each other-Harry and Sally's other romances, his entire married life with Helen happen off-screen. Even before they strike up their friendship, or fall out of favour with each other, the very structure of the film is focused around these moments of friendship, rather than an on-going narrative. Buttressing each of these jumps forward are interviews (in some cases real-life couples restaged), of long-married couples, with the final of these neatly pulling together with the main narrative.

This first jump forward takes us to a meeting in an airport, where Harry blanks Sally for her boyfriend, Joe, before, with dawning realisation on the flight, he begins to recognise, and try to strike up conversation with, Sally. Inevitably, this soon deteriorates, as Harry tries to re-establish his point about male and female relationships, and the two once again separate, vowing never to see each other again. This, of course doesn't last, as the film jumps forward another five years, to what forms the bulk of the film's runtime, where we find Harry newly divorced from Helen, and Sally having broken up with Joe. It is also here that we are introduced to Marie (the late great Carrie Fisher) and Jess (Bruno Kirby), who act as confidants, and eventual mirror to the ups and downs of Harry and Sally's relationship.

It is also here that the film begins to flesh out both Harry and Sally as people, rather than opposing sides of an argument, and it is here that Reiner and Crystal's real life friendship comes to the fore in the creation of Harry. When Harry Met Sally is as much a meditation upon male (and to a degree, female) loneliness as it is about relationships-we see Harry move into a new flat as his divorce goes through, and we see his loneliness, both visually, often isolated in shots, or shot in long-shot, and socially-that is, until Sally, herself recovering from the breakup of his relationship, comes across him in a bookshop. At first, their relationship is tentative, based upon their shared loneliness and a growing mutual respect of each other, but slowly begin to open up to each other, talking openly about their sex lives together.

Cue one of the most famous dining scenes in cinema, a breathlessly funny, and almost savagely knowing swipe against the very idea of female sexuality being at the behest of men. The faked orgasm is not only an immensely funny scene in that it essentially evens out the playing field between Harry and Sally, as the former is utterly embarrassed, not just an incredibly funny scene in that it manages to make female empowerment and sexuality the focus of the scene, but also that it delivers one of the best single lines, and one of the best single scenes of 1980s cinema, with Reiner's own mother delivering the immortal "I'll have what she's having."

But if this dining scene is the high point of their friendship, then it is all downhill from here; their joint plans to set each other up with their best friends backfires as Marie and Jess quickly fall for each other, and, with encounters with their exes, the comedy of errors builds magnificently until the duo end up sleeping with each other, and then rowing at Marie and Jess's wedding, leading to their friendship breaking. One final leap ahead, and the film at first seems to lean back into a scenario where their friendship is repaired, (indeed this is the film's originally scripted ending), but, in one of the great finales of cinema, the duo realise their relationship is much stronger than the ups and downs of the last twelve years, the moment where Ryan's exuberant outgoing New Yorker makes room in her life for the neurotic lonely Crystal. It is an absolutely pitch perfect, copperplate idea of how a romantic comedy should end, a perfect cap to the film in general.

When Harry Met Sally is something special; it's my honest belief that Reiner's 1980s output is a nigh untouchable run of the stalwarts of cinema perfectly executed, from farcical mockumentary to coming-of-age drama, and When Harry Met Sally is there with the best of them. It, in a single word, has converted me to the rom-com as an artform, or at least I have a soft spot for this outing. It is a masterfully told story of two people's relationships with each other, it is a film at once sweetly charming and sharply, almost joyfully cynical about relationships. It is, undeniably, a film driven by its leads, its cleverly written script. It is, undeniably, one of the greatest romantic comedies of the 1980s, a perfect character study of two people, falling in, and out, of love. 

Rating: Must See.

 Like articles like this? Want them up to a week early? Why not support me on my Patreon from just £1/$1.20 a month! https://www.patreon.com/AFootandAHalfPerSecond