When Harry met Sally premiered in 1989, I did not go to see it at a movie theatre. It was not the kind of movie, then, that I would have even thought of seeing. I parted ways with American mainstream movies in the early 80s – I like the 70s movies, and I liked American film noir from the 40s and 50s, and I liked other cinemas from other eras, but the turn to a more conservative and humanistic film style was really not for me.
At some point I must have seen the movie. Or I had seen clips enough from the movie to have the impression I saw the movie.
Well, I finally watched the thing last night. And though I still have many reservations about mainstream humanistic films of the 80s, I found a lot to like about When Harry met Sally.
I haven’t grown any fonder of Billy Crystal, whose pitre face still seems to me to be disastrously blank in close up. His small eyes have a certain lack of depth, a deadness. And I still don’t understand the theme of “can men and women be friends” – I suspect that this is a class and generational issue. I grew up in a household where both parents worked, and my Mom was very close friends with her boss, so I had that model I suppose. And throughout my life, I’ve always had a number of close women friends. So the issue is invisible to me. Whereas the people in the movie are evidently bound to socially upward courses, easily becoming that 80s thing, the gentrifying upper middle in the city.
Yet if the theme is bogus, I can now appreciate, from my own place as a husband and father, the interviews with older couples that punctuate the movie. It is a collage device, which is here used not to put into question the artifice of the story, but to suggest that there are happy stories of marriage. Stories of meeting enhanced in hindsight by the fact that the person met becomes essential to the person one becomes. Fated meetings, meetings of fates. The story of Harry and Sally would lose its freshness without these documentary style interruptions.
It is a very white story. I don’t believe that Harry and Sally’s New York City contains more than one or two black peeps, serving dishes or pouring coffee. No Puerto Ricans, no Dominicans, none of Spike Lee’s New York City. On the one hand, these segregated worlds definitely exist – and on the other hand, from our world since, they are much more marked. Hollywood’s diversity is often of the dumbest, ahistorical kind – throwing black extras into scenes that deny the historic reality of black exclusion because the extras provide a bit of political correctness thrown out there to the multicolored, multi-ethnic audience. Irritating – but from such irritants grow a much larger set of opportunities for black performers. Watching the almost total whiteness of When Harry met Sally now, one has a sense that there has been a change, a small change, in the ethos, which is just the thing that the current administration and its right center media want to reverse.
I don’t watch certain movies in terms of like/dislike – that little switch can be really irritating. I watched this movie hoping that it would be better than I remembered – or that I would be better than the snobby spectator I used to be – and it was and maybe I am. I was happy my boy liked it. And I was happy that my wife, who does see, unfortunately, the snobby and sarcastic idiot I sometime am, saw that I wasn’t as much. And I saw it, obviously, because Rob Reiner’s murder hurts. The affection in this movie, the sheer good humoredness of it, is so missed, now. A big hole has been torn in the side of our disposition to be good humored, to find better fates.
Which is the little corner from which I watch, with a vitiating nostalgic, films showing that American past.
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