WHEN HARRY MET SALLY: Blu-ray (Columbia 1989) MGM/Fox Home Video
The last truly
great romantic comedy to emerge from Hollywood – that is to say, intelligently
scripted and expertly infused with a palpably engaging sexual chemistry that
never talks down to its audience or makes them feel as though their emotions
are being obviously manipulated, ergo, never straining for genuine laughs - Rob
Reiner's When Harry Met Sally (1989)
is a cornucopia of 'cute meets' and 'joyous defeats'. Brilliantly scripted
by the late Nora Ephron, When Harry Met
Sally is deft at extolling the vices rather than the virtues of love in the
Big Apple. Our protagonists are beyond the bounds of adolescent crotch-grabbing
buffoonery, thank heaven. In fact, they are very much closer to the apocalyptic
numeric value of ‘forty’ – the
dreaded kiss of death Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) genuinely fears will befall her
before the prospect of any lasting happiness with a man of her choosing. Sally
is a cockeyed, and slightly obsessive/compulsive, optimist. She wants romance,
and sparkle and the shared communal warmth of two bodies locked in a
post-coital cuddle, uninterrupted by commitment shy phobias. On the flipside is Harry Burns (Billy
Crystal); a complete cynic in matters of the heart, whose devil-may-care
approach to relationships means trolling for great casual sex with whoever happens to
be his gal du jour. Harry is a complete disconnect and an affront to Sally’s
search for Mr. Right. Their first chance meeting, sharing a ride from Boston to
New York, really doesn’t make for a great kick start to amour. Hell, it doesn’t
even add up to an amicable friendship. Or so it would seem. But oh, what
Ephron’s screenplay can do with an ill-suited coupling and their hilariously
rocky start is truly the stuff that dreams are made of.
When it premiered,
When Harry Met Sally was an
immediate sensation with audiences. Twenty-six years later, it remains the best
‘contemporary’ comedy about the
eternal search for passion and truth in all our lives. Without getting too
philosophical, the hurdle for Sally and Harry to overcome is their shared need,
yet inability, to set aside their individual incompleteness in order to be made
whole as a couple. As contrived in countless movies, or finely crafted by life’s
circumstances, When Harry Met Sally
reminds us that no romance is a garden without weeds. Nora Ephron takes the
classic ‘boy meets girl’ scenario and
fashions something more enduring and meaningful from its artful clichés. It’s
still the same old story, a fight for love and glory; a case of do or die.
Except that our protagonists are unwilling to admit it to themselves. What was
that about denial…not just a river in Egypt?
Yet, according
to Ephron, there is more than one way to find ‘a great love’; the task as easy
or as complicated as one chooses to suffer through on his/her own terms. Sally could be happy with Harry, if only she
would let her rigid set of ridiculous standards slip just a little. Alas, she
can only envision herself as the Suzy Cream Cheese homemaker of some
blonde-haired, blue-eyed hunk – the proverbial movie-land unicorn, gleaned from
countless bodice-ripping romance novels and briefly materializing in When Harry Met Sally as the nondescript
but feckless ‘Joe’ (Steven Ford); undeniably good to look at, but with no fixed
bearing to morph into the Paul Henreid meets Albert Schweitzer knockoff of
Sally’s daydreams. Picturing the shorter, curly-haired (with receding hairline,
no less) and decidedly opinionated, Harry Burns as Mr. Right will take some
doing and a greater capacity for imagination.
Coincidentally,
Sally is hardly Harry’s ideal mate or even a perfect date. She is, however, a
true friend and confidante; something Harry’s never known and readily disavows
not to exist at all. “Men and women can’t
be friends because the sex always gets in the way,” he tries to explain. Here
is a guy who, despite unprepossessing looks, still fancies himself the new
young buck in town; who is arrogant enough to believe he has never had a
‘failure’ in the bedroom, leaving each and every one of his sexual conquests
dreaming and screaming for more. On the surface, Harry is decidedly not the man
for Sally. He likes himself far too much and thinks of women as diversions to
satisfy his needs. And yet, Harry marries before Sally: to Helen (Harley Kozak),
a thin-lipped, waspish and emasculating killjoy. Breaking Harry’s heart with an
affair and, later, divorce – thus proves to Sally, Harry has possessed one all
along, despite his braggadocios protestations to the contrary. It also does a
lot to convince Sally that Harry might not be such a bad guy to have around…at
least, as a friend.
Alas, fate
continues to intervene with grander plans, beginning with Harry and Sally’s
counterintuitive plans to inveigle one another with a ‘best friend’ going
through a messy split of their own. Enter, Sally’s gal pal, Marie (Carrie
Fisher) and Harry’s chum, Jess (Bruno Kirby); both successful, miserably alone
and bored with life. Marie is slightly neurotic and trapped in an on again/off
again affair with a married man who is destined never to leave his wife. Jess
just needs someone to love. But as this reluctant foursome go out for dinner it
becomes rather obvious Jess and Marie are fated to be mated to each other,
barely able to wait for the check before bolting down the street into a shared
cab.
When Harry Met Sally is actually less of a
traditional narrative movie and more a series of semi-lucid vignettes;
book-ended by an ill-fated Boston to New York trip and ending with a midnight
rendezvous on New Year’s Eve in which a beleaguered Harry sincerely professes
his love to the only woman who has mattered to him these many years. “I
love that you get cold when it’s 71 degrees out,” Harry begins, “I love that it takes you an hour and a half
to order a sandwich. I love that you get a little crinkle above your nose when
you're looking at me like I'm nuts. I love that after I spend the day with you,
I can still smell your perfume on my clothes. And I love that you are the last
person I want to talk to before I go to sleep at night. And it's not because
I'm lonely, and it's not because it's New Year's Eve. I came here tonight
because when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody,
you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.”
On the
surface, there is nothing extraordinary about Ephron’s dialogue, except it
seems to have been written almost by accident, expressly with Billy Crystal’s
inimitable brand of rapid-fire chutzpah in mind; his cherub-esque cheeks flush
from running six blocks to make this penultimate plea in person as the Waterford
crystal ball is descending in Time Square. Part of When Harry Met Sally’s enduring greatness as a truly outstanding
romantic comedy derives from its strangely sexualized antagonism brewing
between Billy Crystal’s arrogant stag, and Meg Ryan’s wounded doe, each unable
to resist the art of genuine sentiment, especially when heard coming from its
most unlikely source. Harry generally criticizes Sally. Everything from her ‘high maintenance’ personality to
slipshod choice in fantasy studs is fair game for Harry’s ripe barbs. She
infrequently patronizes him, unable to be quite as cruel – at least, for very
long. Things reach a crisis after Harry suggests their one-night stand was predicated
on pity.
In between
these more serious moments of exposition, Ephron frequently diverts our
attentions away from the main plot by writing for Billy Crystal’s sublime
predilection toward self-parody; as when he confides in Sally his reoccurring
dream of partaking in a sexual Olympics where is own mother, disguised as an
East German judge, fails him on technique, presumably basing her decision on
his ‘dismount’; or the riotous moment when, after the dissolution of their
friendship, Harry persists in telephoning and leaving semi-apologetic messages
on Sally’s machine; the best of the lot suggesting only three options for their
persistent stalemate: (a) Sally is not at home, (b) Sally is at home but does
not want to talk to him, or (c) at home, desperate to talk, but trapped under
something heavy! Crystal, a comedian known for his wry wit and possessing a
rare gift for self-deprecating humor, is allowed just so much leeway in Ephron’s
screenplay. A more gregarious grandstander, like the late Robin Williams, might
have seized the opportunity to phase out the sensitivities in Ephron’s prose
with meatier ballast dedicated exclusively to laughs. But Crystal is
intuitively plugged into this material, respecting the art of subtlety and
using even subtler body language to convey his inner puckishness.
In some ways,
the love match in When Harry Met Sally
teeters on the brink of classic byplay a la the likes of a Bud Abbott and Lou
Costello; Meg Ryan the perfect ‘straight
man’ to Crystal’s ebullient punster. Even Ryan’s greatest triumph in the
picture – the now infamously magnificent ‘public
orgasm’ scene, taking place inside a crowded deli, and in which Sally
proves to Harry every woman can fake it to satisfy a man’s ego, is stolen from
under her with an improvisation uttered by Estelle Reiner (the director, Rob
Reiner’s mother); drawing a waiter to her side immediately afterward to inquire, “I’ll have what she’s having.” Ryan’s gift to this movie is thus; that like
the long-suffering Margaret Dumont, the stoic matron featured in virtually all
(or at least, most of) the Marx Bros. classic comedies, she isn’t really trying
to be funny – yet, as a consequence, is very hilarious indeed – adding yet
another layer to Nora Ephron’s sleek and razor-sharp wit. As example; take the scene at the airport
where Harry is reunited with Sally after a period of some years, suggesting, in
a rather drawn out diatribe, that to take someone of the opposite sex to the
airport is “clearly the beginning of a
relationship”, necessitating commitment. After pontificating for several
moments on the reasons, a baffled Ryan, as Sally, simply takes it all in and
shakes her head in disbelief, adding “It’s
amazing. You look like a normal person, but actually, you are the angel of death.”
The other
‘device’ Nora Ephron incorporates into the picture is in lieu of the
traditional ‘flashback’. When Harry Met
Sally is actually a tale being told to the audience in reverse. And yet we
are never entirely aware of this backward unspooling of events until the very
end when a wedded Harry and Sally Burns are seen snuggled together on a couch,
being interviewed by an omnipotent questioner as per ‘how they met’; the device
of the ‘interview’ scattered throughout the film with other aged couples from
varying backgrounds telling their ‘cute
meet’ stories to the audience first. These vignettes have absolutely
nothing to do with the central narrative and are presented in a way that never prefigures
the outcome of the main battle of the sexes taking place between Harry and
Sally, presumably, in real ‘reel’ time.
And yet, the genuineness in these shorts – lensed with real couples
telling their life’s stories - provides the viewer with a grounded sense of
focus and, almost by accident, prepares the audience for the triumph of our
fictional pairing and the proverbial ‘happy ending’.
When Harry Met Sally is infectiously and refreshingly
off beat; screenwriter, Nora Ephron getting top marks for never going the easy
route. At virtually every turn, the movie delights with one unexpected scene
after the next; the complications ensuing between these two unlikely friends
cum lovers mostly enduring difficulties of their own design and friction-building
resistance to admit they are falling in love in spite of themselves. Ephron
draws out an increasingly obvious parallel to their mutual vulnerability;
Sally's compulsiveness and Harry's flippancy, both mere masks hiding a deeper
insecurity soon to be tested and test the staying power of their friendship.
Yet Ephron isn’t playing the game with cards close to her chest. We are always
aware these two unlucky lots will end up together before the final credits. But
this really isn’t the point of the exercise – at least, not as far as Ephron is
concerned. Far more satisfying to both her sensibilities as a writer and as a
woman is how such perfectly suited individuals – quaintly mismatched in their misperceptions
on life and love – could so readily deny and/or resist the transparency of their
own compatibility for so long.
As such, the
crux of the story becomes not so much ‘when’
Harry met Sally, but ‘how’ he will
ultimately come to the realization his search for the perfect mate has ended.
Arguably, Sally comes to this revelation much sooner than Harry; given into a
moment of tearful weakness that lands the couple in bed; Harry repeating his
modus operandi as he bolts for the front door just as soon as the condom has
come off. This, of course, leaves Sally
feeling utterly used and ashamed. It also rips a seemingly irreparable hole in
their friendship. The two drift apart, the sudden separation forcing Harry to
wake up to his truer feelings. The immensity of Harry’s isolation is further
complicated by the perfect union Jess and Marie have forged, in essence,
without even trying. Why is love so hard to come by for Harry Burns and Sally
Allbright? Is it that they expect so much…or perhaps, too little from the world
of possibilities and/or each other? It
is this crisis of conscience that forces Harry to reconsider the real meaning
of cohabitation.
The
penultimate moment of realization, as Harry gallantly storms the ballroom where
Sally, Marie and Jess have gathered to ring in the New Year, declaring his love,
is so genuinely realized by Billy Crystal, so fraught with fearful angst, yet
frustrated resolve to break the cycle of his own romantic failings, the
audience cannot help but share in the release of his vexations as a
tear-stained Sally forgivingly takes him back; primal doubts and all. The postscript – told by a married Harry and
Sally in the present – is more than a little anticlimactic, although I suspect
Ephron needed to cap off her unconventional affair de coeur with something more
substantial than a kiss and freeze-frames taken on the couple’s wedding day. When Harry Met Sally is a triumph of
substance as well as style, in no small part due to Rob Reiner’s superb
direction; sporting a light touch and flair for the romantically absurd, likely
honed during his years as an actor/comedian.
Reiner knows
his way around this milieu as though it were a glorious throwback to the Norman
Lear sitcoms of the 1970s. While another director might have exploited the
vastness of Manhattan’s skyline to tell a story of grand amour set in the Big
Apple, Reiner almost entirely chooses to leave New York quietly in the
background; a few fleeting master shots of Central Park sporting magnificent
fall colors is about all we get to anchor our understanding the whole thing is
taking place in one of the most famously photographed cities in the world. It
is a brilliant decision too, because we have already seen these steel and
concrete vistas and inner city neon-flooded jungles of Manhattan lensed before
and ad nauseam; the cozy tree-lined streets with their brownstone facades and
teeming with the energy of a city that never sleeps.
No, Reiner’s visualization
of New York derives from its acceptance as a life-long New Yorker; someone who
finds nothing extraordinary in these exciting surroundings and is able to
convey a level of lived in comfort in these protagonists, who merely slip in
and out of its’ secluded doorways and taxi cabs. New York needs no
embellishment to hold its own as the unauthorized third participant in any
story. It simply exists as the place where anything can – and usually does –
happen.
Story wise:
Harry Burns and Sally Albright’s first 'cute meet' happens on a road trip to
New York after their college graduation. She finds his “men and women can’t be friends” philosophy perverse and sexist. He
thinks she is a real prude. Upon their arrival in Manhattan, the two part
company, never suspecting they will see each other again. However, after several
years, and more than a few setbacks, break ups, and misfires in their
respective private lives, the two accidentally reunite on a plane ride; Harry
finagling a more meaningful conversation that slowly ingratiates him to Sally.
Gradually, these two sworn enemies find common ground, enough to become casual
friends. Still, neither seems to think the other would be a compatible mate.
Instead, they nurse one another through a series of flawed relationships, all
the while steadily drawn closer to each other. Sally decides to fix Harry up
with her best friend, Marie, who is involved with a married man. Harry sets Sally
up with his best friend, Jess (Bruno Kirby); a single and frustrated freelance
writer. The foursome meets at a fashionable restaurant, desperately/awkwardly
anxious, yet still hoping for a spark of chemistry to surface. It does, except
between Jess and Marie, leaving Harry and Sally to stroll off together.
Sally has a
mild breakdown after she learns that her ex, Joe is engaged to someone else. In
tears, she telephones Harry for solace. Instead, he comes over and the two have
sex. But almost immediately, Harry regrets this moment. Sally slowly comes to
this realization too, but only after Harry bluntly explains that he slept with
her out of pity. But did he really? In the intervening months leading up to New
Year's Eve, Sally shuns her one-time friend, forcing Harry to come to terms
with his own emotions regarding their friendship. What he quickly realizes is
that a future without Sally is no future at all.
It goes
without saying When Harry Met Sally
is a superior romantic comedy. It hits all the high notes seemingly without
effort and tackles the more pressing issues of commitment and love with great
humility, honesty, sincerity and heart. That it all appears so genuine is
deceiving, because every last detail has been masterfully orchestrated by
director, Rob Reiner, who sells this simple story as high art and comes away
with a movie long to be remembered, embraced and cherished. It has already been
twenty plus years and When Harry Met Sally
shows virtually no signs of falling out of favor, fashion, or, for that matter,
aging into obscurity. The trick and the magic lies in the intangibles and the
way they come together to form and carry off its nimble premise. Ephron’s
screenplay is a start; ditto for Reiner’s direction and the succinct and
compelling chemistry between co-stars Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan. But
ultimately, the sheer joy of the picture registers in a very gray area caught
somewhere between all of these particulars, striving for such perfection and,
arguably, attaining it without ever drawing attention to the careful
craftsmanship behind the laughter. It’s been a very long while since another
well-intended comedy has made the grade. Most coming down the pipeline today
don’t even make the effort to try.
MGM/Fox Home
Video currently holds the rights to When
Harry Met Sally (originally a Columbia release – odd) and their Blu-ray is
very impressive. The image exhibits bold, rich and detailed colors with superb
detail. Blacks are solid and deep. Whites are pristine. The image is razor
sharp without being digitally harsh. Grain looks like grain. This is a
reference quality disc of a truly deserving film. The audio has been remastered
in 5.1 DTS. Despite being dialogue driven, there is very good separation in the
sound field: a very rewarding listening experience with subtler bits of
ambiance. Extras are all ported over from MGM's previously issued DVD and
include ‘making of’ featurettes, an audio commentary and the original
theatrical trailer. Bottom line: Very highly recommended.
FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)
5+
VIDEO/AUDIO
5
EXTRAS
3
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