This Review Reveals Minor Details About the Plot.
Get With It
Plot Overview
In 1977
just graduated from U of Chicago
Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) and Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) car pool
18 hours to New York City to take up their new lives there: Harry
as a political consultant and Sally for journalism school. They're
friends of a friend. They order separately at a diner; Sally is
particular about her side dish and Harry snacks between meals.
During their palaver Harry comes on to her, or she thinks he does.
Sally gets all in a huff because he is going with her
friend—though that long distance relationship is
inherently doomed. Harry justifies himself: Yada, yada, yada,
and now I'm with you. Sally informs him he is not
“WITH” her. They part more or less cordially in the Big
Apple. For all the shakiness of their nodding
acquaintanceship, he is currently her only friend in a city of
8 million, and they're not so easy to make outside a
campus environment where she left lots of them behind.
Five
years later Harry bumps into a professional friend Joe (Steven
Ford) at the airport who is with Sally having escorted her
there to see her off. On the plane Harry sits with her in the
adjacent seat, and they catch up. Harry, surprisingly, is about to
get married. He refrains from making the earlier mistake, and they
settle on being “just friends.”
Another five years pass. Harry and
Sally come across each other in the self-help section of the public
library. Sally having recently broken up with Joe is with her best
friend Marie (Carrie Fisher) who's helping her cope. Men being less
sociable than women, Harry is by himself as his (unfaithful)
wife Helen Hillson had recently divorced him leaving him morose.
Harry and Sally go for some coffee. On the way Harry offers her a
heartfelt apology for his initial behavior. They concur that
“this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
They
spend a lot of time together and take in the holiday festivities of
a city that never sleeps. They fix Harry up with Marie and Sally
with Harry's one friend Jess (Bruno Kirby) and go on a double date.
Neither of those pairings works out, but Marie and Jess hit it off
and are soon engaged. With both their best friends getting married
and likely to drift away into the matrimonial sphere, the
unintentional matchmakers are put on the spot. Unless they
themselves get married, they'll have to start all over again
from scratch.
Four couples get together for some home party games: Sally's
married friend Alice (Lisa Jane Persky,) who has young children,
and her husband, Marie and Jess, Sally and her date, and Harry and
his. They pick up teams and Harry and Sally keep glancing jealously
at each other's dates. It gets to be not so much a matter of who is
with whom but who's on first.
Shopping for Jess & Marie's wedding present Harry runs into Helen (Harley Kozak) and her new beau, which leaves him depressed. Joe phones Sally out of the blue to tell her he's getting married to his new legal aide. That puts her off stride as in what's she got that I ain't got? She laments, “I'm gonna be 40 some day.” Harry consoles her, “In eight years.” She replies, “But it's there. It's just sitting there like a dead end.” It's as in a story related by Molly Martin:
The apprenticeship book that I was given to look at had over three hundred apprenticeships, most of them with an age limit of thirty two. … I was about a month away from my thirty-second birthday and figured I was dead in the water. But she said that carpenters were only open for two weeks every two years and they happened to be open right then. The problem was the carpenters were gong on strike the next week and it promised to be a long strike, lasting beyond my thirty-second birthday. So my only chance was to get a job in the next two days before the strike. (47)
Harry and Sally commiserate with each
other at her place, and the morning after, they realize they'd made
a “big mistake.” The scenes in this movie are
interspersed with vignettes of aged married couples telling
the stories of how they met and got together. Each one is different
and unique, but it's doubtful any of the old conservative coots made the
same mistake Harry and Sally made, or if they did, they wouldn't be telling
it. Some mistakes are harder to rectify than others.
Ideology
Harry and Sally's road talk devolved into Harry's challenge that Sally had never had great sex. Entering the diner she defended herself loudly saying she had had “GREAT SEX!” then seeing she was now in public and calling attention to herself, she cooled it. It's an instance of, (Proverb 30:32) “If thou hast done foolishly in lifting up thyself, or if thou hast thought evil, lay thine hand upon thy mouth.”
Harry similarly gets in trouble later by flattering Jess's ill-chosen housewarming furniture and then being called on it. He loses it. Sally intervenes saying, “Do we have to talk about this right now? He just bumped into Helen.” Then she finds Harry who had stepped out, and she remonstrates with him: “Harry, you're just gonna have to find a way of not expressing every feeling you have when you have them. There are times and places.”
Production Values
“” (1989) was directed by Rob Reiner. It was written by Nora Ephron. It stars Billy Crystal, Meg Ryan and Carrie Fisher. They were hands down good actors and had a good support cast.
The movie is rated R. The background music was pleasantly relevant. A split screen was sometimes employed to good effect. In a deleted scene the protagonists compare the number of sex partners each has had. Sally claims two and Harry at least ten. The rule of thumb is you want to cut the man's number in half and double the woman's. That means Sally had four and Harry all of five … if you count the one performance disappointment. They are equally matched, for what it's worth. Runtime is 1 hour 35 minutes.
Review Conclusion w/a Christian's Recommendation
In the course of their discussions Harry asks Sally why she treats Sunday different from the other six workdays of the week, and she replies, “Because of God.” Discussing the movie “Casablanca” Harry would have preferred Ilsa going back to the bartender Rick while Sally was content with her sticking with her husband. These differences in how they regard two of the Ten Commandments would be a good place to start a religious discussion with one's date.
This was a very engaging movie. I'd call it a winner.
Movie Ratings
Action Factor: Weak action scenes. Suitability For Children: Not Suitable for Children of Any Age. Special effects: Average special effects. Video Occasion: Good Date Movie. Suspense: A few suspenseful moments. Overall movie rating: Four stars out of five.
Works Cited
Scripture quoted from the King James Version. Pub. 1611, rev. 1769. Software.
Martin, Molly editor. “Pat Cull * Carpenter” from Hard Hatted Women. Copyright © 1988 by Molly Martin. Seattle: Seal Press, 1988. Print.
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