WHEN HARRY MET SALLY: 30th Anniversary Blu-ray re-issue (Columbia, 1989) Shout! Select
The last truly
great romantic comedy to emerge from Hollywood – that is to say, intelligently
scripted and expertly suffused with a tangibly 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. Thirty 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 of Eden
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 counter-intuitive plans to inveigle one another with a ‘best friend’ going through a messy
split of their own. Enter, Sally’s gal pal, Marie (the late, 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 seventy-one 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’ 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 twist of fate 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
Albright? 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 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 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 lays in these
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 an effort to try.
MGM/Fox Home
Video currently holds the rights to When
Harry Met Sally (originally a Columbia release – odd) and Shout! Factory’s
Blu-ray reissue, despite being advertised as NEW from a 4K scan of the original
camera negative, looks virtually identical to MGM/Fox’s old release with
marginally improved colors. Personally, I see no good reason for reissuing deep
catalog titles to disc, especially when so many other deep catalog titles have
yet to resurface at all on Blu-ray, and, the reissue has already been given
plenty of releases, with only minimal added content and crappy air-brushed
cover art to boot, simply to denote a 30th Anniversary. But there it
is. 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. The
only new to Blu extra is ‘Scenes From A
Friendship’ – An Interview With Rob Reiner And Billy Crystal that is quaint,
but not altogether satisfying. For the rest, you are getting all of the old
MGM/Fox extras, repackaged, including 2 audio commentaries, the first
co-starring Rob Reiner, Nora Ephron and Billy Crystal, the second, exclusively
produced for MGM/Fox’s own Blu-ray debut a decade earlier. Shout! has also
ported over the ‘How Harry Met Sally’
featurette and other vintage junkets, deleted scenes, a Harry Connick Jr. music
video and original theatrical trailer. Nicely put together but a tad redundant,
this Blu-ray reissue of Reiner’s timeless comedy is well worth your coin if you
don’t already own the previous Blu. Bottom line: very highly recommended.
FILM RATING (out of 5 - 5 being the best)
5+
VIDEO/AUDIO
5+
EXTRAS
3.5
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