IMDb 7.7 / 10
Official trailer
Rob Reiner directed, Nora Ephron wrote, and Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan play two people who meet driving from Chicago to New York in 1977, dislike each other, and keep running into one another for the next twelve years. Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby play the friends who get together while the leads are still arguing.
It cost about $16 million and made roughly $93 million, and it has stayed in circulation ever since, especially around New Year’s Eve.
I know this one from its famous scenes and from what’s been written about it, and what grabs me is Ephron’s script. Two people arguing about a real question for twelve years is my idea of a love story. Most romantic comedies lose me at the invented misunderstanding, and this one seems to have no use for that kind of cheat.
The Argument
The film opens with Harry telling Sally that men and women can’t be friends, because the sex part always gets in the way. Sally disagrees. The next two hours test the proposition across a decade, and the film’s answer is more complicated than either position. That structure is why it works. Most romantic comedies invent obstacles. This one has a thesis, and every scene is evidence for or against it, so the conversations have somewhere to go. The pair meet three times before they become friends, five years apart each time, so the audience watches both of them fail at other relationships before the film lets them near each other.
Ephron’s Dialogue
The script is the reason people still quote this film. The arguments about how Sally orders food, about whether men and women can be friends, about the faked reaction in the deli, are written as debates between two specific people instead of as banter.
Those arguments are what I’d defend hardest. Ephron writes them so both people have a point, and I think that’s rarer in screen comedy than it should be. Harry’s theory about friendship is half right, and she lets him make the case properly before the film starts poking holes in it. Ephron based much of it on interviews with Reiner, then divorced and miserable, and that’s where Harry’s pessimism comes from. Crystal contributed a good deal of his own material.
It’s also a film about New York, and it opens the template Ephron would use in Sleepless in Seattle and You’ve Got Mail: articulate people in an expensive city talking each other out of their own feelings.
The Deli Scene
Sally demonstrates in the middle of Katz’s Delicatessen that a woman can convincingly fake enjoyment, and an older woman at the next table tells the waiter she’ll have what she’s having.
The woman is Estelle Reiner, the director’s mother, and Billy Crystal wrote the line. It’s the most quoted moment in the film and among the most quoted in American comedy.
The scene also does story work. Harry’s certainty about what he knows takes its first real hit in public, and the film gets there through a joke instead of a confrontation. The deli scene deserves every bit of its fame as far as I’m concerned. I’m especially fond of how the biggest laugh in the picture comes at the moment Harry’s confidence cracks, so the joke moves the story forward instead of stopping it.
For Writers
The deli scene is a famous gag and it also destroys Harry’s central assumption in front of witnesses. The best comic set pieces advance the argument of the story. When you write a scene meant to be funny, check that something changes in it, so the laugh costs a character something. Take your funniest scene and ask what a character believes differently afterward. If the answer is nothing, it’s a sketch sitting inside your book, and readers can feel the story stop.
Twelve Years
The film covers 1977 to 1989 and uses time as its main tool. The leads meet, part for five years, meet again, part again, and only become friends in the last third. Each gap changes them in ways the film shows instead of announcing: worse haircuts, better jobs, one divorce, one broken engagement.
That patience is unusual. Most romantic comedies run over a few weeks, and their obstacles feel invented because of it. Here the obstacle is that both people are wrong about themselves and need years to find out.
It also means the ending has weight. When Harry runs across New York on New Year’s Eve, he’s running toward a person he’s known for twelve years, not somebody he met at a coffee cart in act one.
For Writers
The story runs twelve years, so the couple’s problem stops being an obstacle and becomes a fact about who they are. Time is the cheapest and most underused device a writer has. When your conflict feels artificial, try stretching the timeline until the characters have lived with the problem long enough for it to be theirs. Ask how long your story covers. Then ask what changes if it covers five years instead of five weeks.
Crystal and Ryan
Crystal plays Harry as a man who mistakes cynicism for insight, and the performance keeps him likable while he’s being insufferable. It’s the closest his film career came to a definitive role. Ryan built a decade of stardom on this part. Sally is precise, controlled and slightly ridiculous about it, and the film treats her particularity as character instead of a flaw for love to correct.
Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby take the secondary couple and make them more than filler. Fisher’s rolodex scene and her running commentary on married life are among the sharpest things in the film.
Carrie Fisher and Bruno Kirby are the pair I’m most curious about. From the clips I know, her running commentary on married life is as sharp as anything the leads get, and I like a romantic comedy that gives its side couple real lines to work with.
The Documentary Inserts
Between chapters, older couples sit on a sofa and tell the camera how they met. They’re actors working from real interviews, and the stories are unhurried, sentimental and slightly banal. They serve two purposes. They mark the passage of time across twelve years, and they keep promising the audience an ending that the main story keeps refusing to deliver. It’s a structural device you rarely see in comedies, and it’s part of why the film feels larger than its plot.
For Writers
The interviews with older couples act as a chorus, promising the ending long before the story is willing to arrive there. A repeating structural device can hold a long timeline together and set an expectation at the same time. When your story spans years, find a recurring form, a letter, an interview, a place revisited, that marks time and holds meaning. Choose one element you can return to five or six times. Make sure it means something different on each appearance. Repetition without change is a tic; repetition with change is structure.
Why the Score Is 7.7
A 7.7 on IMDb is high for a romantic comedy, a genre whose scores usually sit in the low sixes, and it reflects a film that critics and audiences agree on.
The complaints are mostly about the ending, where the film delivers the speech and the New Year’s Eve declaration it spent two hours being too clever for. I’m partly with the complainers. The twelve years give the run across New York real weight, but the speech itself sounds like the genre’s oldest move, and I’d have liked Ephron to trust her thesis all the way to the last scene.
The praise is for the script, the leads and the structure. It’s the film every romantic comedy since has borrowed from, and most of the borrowers take the banter and leave the argument behind.
Craft Note
Ephron gives her film a thesis in the first five minutes and spends two hours testing it, so every conversation is evidence instead of filler. Give your story a question worth arguing about, and the dialogue will have somewhere to go. Banter without an argument underneath is noise.
Is When Harry Met Sally worth watching?
IMDb users have it at 7.7, unusually high for the genre, and the critical consensus is that it’s the best romantic comedy of its era and the template for everything after it. The script, the two leads and the deli scene are the reasons.
There’s no rating from me on this page, since I haven’t seen it. The 7.7 makes sense to me for a romantic comedy with an actual argument in it and a script people are still quoting, and my one reservation is that speech at the end. The script, the two leads and the deli scene put it near the top of the films I’d like to see properly.
