Comparing Rob Reiner's new romantic comedy, Story of Us, with his classic 1989 movie When Harry Met Sally is almost irresistible. Both feature a likable couple struggling with the inevitable difficulties of a relationship, both employ documentary-style interviews to break up the story, and both have a number of funny lines about the rules of courting. Unfortunately, while Harry Met Sally stands as one of the great movies of the '80s, Story of Us is a forgettable, depressing journey through the breakup of a marriage.

Ben and Katie Jordan (Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer) have been married for fifteen years. They've grown together, raised two children and, somehow over time, grown apart. After they send their kids off to summer camp, they decide to separate, at least for the summer until they can figure out whether their marriage can be saved.

The film is a chronicle of that summer, along with an unhealthy dose of flashbacks along the way. We see the couple struggling with their first couple nights of separation (longing looks at the telephone), those awkward phone calls, the first dinner back together, parents weekend at camp, all interspersed with scenes of their courtship and marriage.

One of the biggest problems with the movie is that so many of the flashbacks are fight scenes. While the scenes are realistically written and acted, they are also progressively more depressing. And every time it appears that Ben and Katie will be able to set aside their differences and make a go of it, some little comment or look triggers a flashback and we have yet another argument. Reiner and writers Alan Zweibel and Jessie Nelson are so intent on showing how this marriage fell apart that we don't get a sense of why they got married in the first place.

To the film's credit, Willis and Pfeiffer are both strong, Willis particularly so. His sympathetic, if disorganized, father is winning and convincing. The same cannot be said of the minor characters that populate this film. Their sole purpose is to crack witty jokes about sex (though not nearly as funny as the writers think they are) or to play the buffoon. I mean, how hard is it to write a scene with a misguided real estate agent, a series of weird marriage counselors, or two awful tourists? And yet the only joke here is that they're strange. Where is Billy Crystal when you need him? Furthermore, the sexual jokes are fairly crude, and there is surprisingly strong language for a movie that's being marketed as a
romantic comedy.

The most interesting comparison between Story of Us and When Harry Met Sally is how the two films wrap it up. (If you don't want to know how Story of Us ends, you should probably stop reading here, though anyone with half a brain can figure it out from the first two minutes of the movie) The conclusion of Harry Met Sally is, even for folk who love the film, abrupt and somewhat contrived. But the audience has spent the entire movie seeing how perfect Harry and Sally are for each other that it doesn't care. They belong together, and we're thrilled to see it happen, even if it doesn't make a lot of sense. Ben and Katie Jordan get back together in a similarly abrupt, unconvincing fashion. But here, we've spent the whole movie watching them fight, so it's much harder to accept their reconciliation.

The final scene in Story of Us mimics the ending of Harry Met Sally. Ben and Katie are talking to each other as well as the camera. Ben remarks, "And then they lived mostly happily ever after." He turns to Katie and asks, "Do you think so?" She responds, "I do." Well, I don't.

J. Robert Parks  10/19/99