When Harry Met Sally…

When Harry Met Sally… details the friendship that develops over the years between the title characters, Billy Crystal’s Harry and Meg Ryan’s Sally, with the movie exploring the pair’s separate love lives and their continued need to lean on one another for support. Director Rob Reiner has infused When Harry Met Sally… with a low-key and deliberately-paced feel that proves an ideal complement to Nora Ephron’s chatty screenplay, with the film, in its early stages, perfectly content to dwell on the title characters’ conversations on various wide-ranging topics (although the focus remains, not surprisingly, on the ins and outs of relationships). It does, as such, take a while before the movie is able to become as consistently compelling as one might’ve hoped, as the film’s meandering opening half hour results in an atmosphere of palpable unevenness that is, admittedly, allayed by both Crystal and Ryan’s almost unreasonably charismatic work. There’s subsequently little doubt that When Harry Met Sally… improves steadily as it progresses, with the deepening friendship between the protagonists, coupled with a continuing emphasis on snappy, authentic dialogue, paving the way for an impressively emotional finale. (This is despite the inclusion of a decidedly underwhelming stretch in which Harry and Sally, in a variation on the fake break-up cliche, get into a fight and stop speaking.) The end result is a better-than-average romantic comedy that remains just as relevant now as it did in 1989, which is certainly a testament to the strength of both Ephron’s truthful screenplay and the central performances.

*** out of ****

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