A Film Canon

Composed as a series of vignettes in the friendship of Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan), When Harry Met Sally... could have been an exquisite tone-poem to 80s New York, an autumnal evocation of the subsiding wave of sexual liberation, and a contemplation of how Woody Allen's renewal of screwball comedy might translate into the 90s. Instead, it ushers in a new kind of female chauvinist pig, who only seems to rail against the conservatism of marriage for the sake of becoming more marriageable, ultimately accepting everything that constitutes a "human affront to women" as an index of charismatic literacy. For all they seem to embrace the continuity between friendship and romance, Reiner and Ephron never approach the sophistication or ambivalence of the conclusion of Casablanca, from which they continually and laboriously take their cues. Instead, they present friendship between a man and a woman as something sufficiently unthinkable to become a comic premise, projecting an incredulity onto the audience that quickly becomes tiresome, especially when paired with Crystal and Ryan's crude embodiments of gendered thought, which never approach the charming quasi-philosophical contrivances of Woody Allen's New York mouthpieces. Combined with the unbearable interviews with 'real' married people that parse these vignettes, any kind of comic or liberated distance from sexual conservatism quickly becomes the false consciousness of a film that is obsessed with policing and segregating desire; the worst kind of 'values' cinema, and distinctively anti-screwball. The strongest moments are those in which Harry and Sally meet or behave inappropriately in transit, but even these flow into their designations as "transitional people", part of an obsessive micro-analysis that anticipates Seinfeld, but in the worst possible way. Early in the film, Harry demonstrates his eccentricity by claiming that he always reads the last page of a book first, just in case he dies before completing it - but this is one book that doesn't require that at all, its final fetishism of marriage as the ultimate neocommodity being totally predictable from the first scene; a manifesto for every worthless citizen in dire need of "a date on national holidays".