On Harry Met Sally
Is Harry met Sally the finest film ever? It is over thirty years since I first saw it, so I was ready to be disappointed and to learn that it did not deserve its place in my mental film ranking league table. Its misfortune is to be categorised as a ‘romcom’; a term which inspires thoughts of frivolity and shallowness. Sure, you may think it is not as profound and intense as many other contenders, but think about this from my perspective. The protagonist is called Burns. It opens with Louis Armstrong. It ends with more Burns, as the loving couple debate Auld Lang Syne’s meaning and it turns to Casablanca, the finest black and white film ever, to catalyse the opening of the friendship and to give momentum to what finally gets consummated as an affair.
As Harry reminds her, “I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” is “the best last line of a movie ever”, as he contemplates Bogart. Nora Ephron then proceeds to write some of the best movie lines ever, that are not last lines of movies. To remind the audience of someone else’s peerless film-making, is about as immodest a way to introduce the perfection of the film one is watching, as can be contemplated, and might be thought a little presumptuous, but it enhances rather than spoils. This is not shallow.
Currently one can enjoy the line by line perfection on i-player. From the moment Harry invites Sally to tell the story of her life to give colour to the prospective eighteen-hour journey by car to New York, and we get introduced to her pedantry in the restaurant ordering specifics, it does not drop a beat. How many guys can come back from a “empirically, you are attractive” line. One of the greatest uncomplimentary compliments in all of movieland.
It takes about ten minutes before Harry introduces the theme of men and women being incapable of a platonic friendship, perfectly matched with Satchmo singing “you say either, and I say either”. Little wonder that five years after the first encounter, Sally is able to tell Harry “you look like a normal person, but actually…”
The joy of seeing it so many years after the first viewing is knowing there are great lines to appreciate but not remembering them all. “Grab him. Someone else is married to your husband” and “even though we were happy it was just an illusion”. “What’s the statute of limitations on an apology?” which leads to the unforgettable exchange, “Great, a woman friend. You know you may be the first attractive woman I have not wanted to sleep with in my entire life/That’s wonderful, Harry”. Little wonder that Harry believes “I can say anything to her”, but Sally will soon be telling him, “you are an affront to all women and I am a woman”.
We are almost three quarters of an hour in before we get the iconic fake orgasm scene and “I’ll have what she’s having” and the pace has not dropped once. As Marie continues to agonise over her affair with the husband everyone agrees will never leave his wife, we wait for Harry and Sally to recognise that their inseparability over many years is because they are not the incompatibles they believe themselves to be. The things a man will do to be heard are beautifully encapsulated in his singing to her voicemail “Call Me”, only to break through her latest defence and then be told “I am not your consolation prize”.
Finally, the truth dawns on him one New Year. After having slept with her as she recovers from the shock of learning that her one time serious boyfriend is finally going to marry, and to marry a girl he has only known a short time who works in his office, and believing that his assertion that men and women cannot be platonic friends and that their sex has ruined his one contrary piece of evidence to his hypothesis, he races to meet her and gives one of the great romantic speeches about why a man loves a woman. Watch it; it’s amazing and I had forgotten how good it is.
I doubt the smile left my face during the course of the whole film and the marriage of the music choices with the scenery and the dialogue just kept shouting ‘perfection’ to me. Critics think it is sexist and that Rob Reiner’s direction plays up to Ephron’s dialogue in emphasising a male dominance largely represented by Harry’s references to the ‘high-maintenance and low-maintenance’ woman contrast. I am not so sure, and for all Harry’s cock-suredness in the opening decade that the film covers, it is him who marries first and then cannot handle his wife’s infidelity, the subsequent divorce and who applies all the classic avoidance, fear of rejection strategies.
Meg Ryan’s Sally is not passive and far from helpless. The running gag about her need to be utterly precise when ordering everything from her burger to a salad is funny because we can imagine the staff bemused by the customer’s specificity (can you hear your friends saying ‘so anal’ about such behaviour), but actually it is a statement of assertive control. As he tells him “Well, I just want it the way I want it”. Her confidence in what she likes and needs may be one reason he avoids turning the friendship into something sexual. So, I don’t think it is a film that panders to male views and demeans female behaviours.
Megan Garber, in an article published in The Atlantic, had interviewed Ephron, who was quick to defend Harry from being callous. As Garber wrote the film “is ultimately the story of Harry’s arc: The question it asks, in the end, is not whether women and men can be friends, but whether a guy who hates almost everyone can open himself up to a single someone. That he proves able to evolve suggests an absolution.” Less about relationships and more about one flawed guy’s attempt at a truly loving relationship. As we are all flawed to some extent, I think it is this element that appeals to me.
The other feature of the film is the passage of time. Not much changes for Sally bar a couple of hair styles, but what happens in the film is that time sees changes of environment — homes and jobs, of other friendships, of marriages and divorces that affect one, and through it all, important friendships navigate a path. Some end up in bed, some at the altar, but all are going to change us in some way or other. So, I laughed at the fake orgasm, and I waited for Harry to turn his candour into the magnificent declaration of love at the end, but I realised that the film affected me because it too is like a great friend. Constant, changing, but mostly, capable of changing me. Of course, it plays out with “It Had to Be You” being crooned perfectly. Because, at least to me, it is a little bit of perfection.
