REVIEW:
One of the rare romantic comedies that is unique to the genre. This movie is about two people who are not romantically linked for about eighty percent of the movie, but instead keep finding that their lives bring them back into contact with each other. This is the story of all of the encounters when Harry and Sally keep meeting. In a sense, the title is dead on accurate, as far as this being the story of when they met and then met again and again. And like most romantic comedies, at first the girl cannot stand the guy. In fact, that goes on for quite a while throughout this film.
Billy Crystal really shows his stand up comedian chops here going on rants and raves throughout the movie about all kinds of theories he has. The one that seems to come up the most is that men and women can’t be friends with each other. The reason is because the man always wants to sleep with the woman. Otherwise, he’s not wasting his time being friends with her. But this is just one of the many claims made by Crystal in the movie and Ryan is constantly telling him how ridiculous he is with all of this.
The movie chronicles their relationship from acquaintances to friends to romantically involved. And each one of these three stages gets significant screen time. In fact most of the movie is about the stage where they are just friends. And it works. In fact, this is where the two of them probably have the most interesting discussions about life and the things that both of them have experienced, including Sally’s famous restaurant scene where she fakes an orgasm. It’s a fun, cute, light-hearted movie that includes sweet little moments of old couples taking to the camera as if part of a documentary, about the start of their relationship and how they met or first got together. There’s also the story of their two friends who each of them try to set up with the other (Sally tries to set her friend up with Harry and vice versa for his friend, although neither of it works.) And then the two friends that each one of them brings end up hitting it off with each other. All of it works. There’s a lot going on here, and that turns out to be a good thing making the movie fast-past and witty. This a clever, fun little film.