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Author:
Sheila Benson
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Sheila Benson was the principal Los Angeles Times film critic from 1981-91, following which she was their Critic At Large, writing on all aspects of the cultural life of that city. She also has written for Cinemania/msn.com for which she was chief film critic and many other papers.
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If critics can be said to have favorites -- and they have -- early on Sheila was a particular champion of independent films, as they were finding their voice and their power. As a result, her reports from the earliest days of Telluride, Toronto, Mill Valley and the Sundance festivals found their way into what was then the "Industry"-centric Times.
Moving online, she was chief film critic for Microsoft's invaluable Cinemania from its birth to its death, 4 ½ years later. She has also contributed coverage, essays and interviews to Interview, Elle, Premiere, Film Comment, Variety, the San Francisco Examiner, the Seattle Weekly, London Telegraph's Weekend magazine, Canada's Globe and Mail American Film Magazine and the New York Times.
Affiliated with the National Society of Film Critics, FIPRESCI (the International Film Critics Association) and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (1981-95), she has taught Critical Writing at UCLA and has been a jury member at the film festivals of Berlin, Toronto, Chicago, Montreal, Hawaii, Manila, Seattle, Aspen, Sundance/Park City, Taos, Banff and Palm Springs. In 1987, she was given the Vesta Award for Journalism for her contribution to the arts in Southern California. She wrote the narration for Chuck Workman's "The First 100 Years: A Celebration of American Film" for Bravo, and in 2004 wrote the critical essay for the DVD of Horton Foote's Tomorrow for Home Vision Entertainment.
Having moved to Washington in 1996, she now reviews for the Seattle Weekly.
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"When Harry Met Sally"
Bless Harry and Sally's hearts. Over the course of their eleven years under our bemused scrutiny, they actually talk to each other, in splendid, risible exchanges that fly by with the speed and delicacy of a great badminton game. Bless too, director Rob Reiner and credited screenwriter Nora Ephron for ladling out the pleasure with so generous and tender a hand. It makes
"When Harry Met Sally". . . the summer's uncorseted, unqualified delight.
While ostensibly sorting out the question of whether men and women can be friends, before or after sex raises its lovely head,
"When Harry Met Sally" is actually casting a hopeful and persuasive eye on romance today. On marriage even. The film's progression, with pit stops every 4 or 5 years, is separated by mock-documentary interviews as long-married couples cheerfully describe their fateful first meetings. Affection, as well as a simmering wit, is very definitely in the air.
If that doesn't sound quite like the Ephron of old (certainly not the Ephron of Heartburn, which had an undertaste so nasty you could be puckered for a month afterward), it's possibly because Reiner and Billy Crystal, longtime collaborators, reportedly added a good deal themselves during the film making. Wherever it came from, the results are charming.
No one will miss the fact that this Manhattan-based talkfest, with Gershwin on the soundtrack and upscale, self-scrutinizing New Yorkers on the menu, has a distinct Woody Allen flavor. Agreed. However,
"When Harry Met Sally" has an irresistible, crackling rhythm that is Reiner's own. Besides, is it necessarily bad if a film shares Allen's territory and even some of his attitudes?
Sally (Meg Ryan) literally picks up Harry (Crystal) as the two make their way in her car from the University of Chicago campus to New York. It's 1977. She's just graduated, he's just finished law school. New York, watch out.
Harry is also glued, lip, hip and anklebone, to Sally's friend Amanda in the deathless melodrama of a farewell kiss. Then--bickering all the way-- Harry and Sally begin what is to be a fateful ridesharing. Amanda, watch out.
What follows are a series of dispatches from the singles skirmishing front, upscale New York style. They cover marriage (she's keeping her name) and divorce; living-together and breaking up; affairs with married men and that full-blown horror, post-divorce dating. Rounding out the cast are Sally's best friend Marie (Carrie Fisher, possessor of one of the most deft and deadly deadpans anywhere) and Harry's buddy Jess (Bruno Kirby, perfect foil for both Harry and Marie.)
As they skitter hesitantly around and then away from their fate, Ryan's and Crystal's work has a delicate comic buoyancy, amazing grace in action. Crystal seems to have the edge at the opening: he may be abrasive and self-absorbed but he's got the movie's funniest raunchy lines and a scorching delivery that seems to set the movie's pace. He's like a scrappy shortstop you can't take your eyes off. What becomes touching is to find that under the mouth and the razzle-dazzle there's a sweetheart, cover that fact though he might.
Ryan, on the other hand, grows on us from a slower start. As we meet her, 21 years old, with her exquisitely snippy nose permanently raised, she's preternaturally sure of her likes and dislikes. It's easy to be put off by so much certainty--although how can you resist a girl who knows she wouldn't want to spend the rest of her life in Casablanca, married to a guy who runs a bar. (She maintains that Ingrid Bergman wouldn't either,
"Women are very practical, which is why she gets on that plane at the end.'' Ah, youth.)
Fortunately, as Sally's experience grows, she blossoms and so does her faintly fey sense of humor, resulting in the movie's funniest moment, that about-to-be-infamous deli sequence. (The line that tops it--the movie's and maybe the year's best--delivered by director Reiner's mother, Estelle, sitting one booth away, was reportedly Crystal's contribution. And frankly, none of this seems enough to give this film its MPAA R-rating, when the bloody carnage of the newest Bond film walks off with a PG-13.)
Part of our fun comes from watching Harry and Sally mellow from college graduates, smug in their assurance that they know everything, to thirty-some-ers, appalled at the loneliness of the world out there, wanting to draw their wagons together in the dark and not exactly sure how to.
The other perverse giggle comes from the movie's mirror of the trends and fashions during the decade-and-a-bit it covers. It may come with a shudder of recognition. Sneer all you will at Harry's aggressively wide sideburns or Sally's 1977 flip, but keep the family album closed when you do.
There's something that remains a little superficial to Harry and Sally; although Harry may brood about his dark side there are no shadowing strokes (as there were in Reiner's Stand by Me) that might etch Harry or Sally or their milieu a little deeper. It may be something that audiences miss, or, they may be grateful for the pace and the execution of the smart melee brightening the screen, the visual equivalent of Harry Connick, Jr.'s Gershwin piano arrangements threaded throughout the movie. In this perilous Summer of the Sequel, it seems churlish to want more than wit and sophistication on a bedrock of tenderness.
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