Culturally, it sometimes feels like we’re back in the late ’90s again: Britney Spears is dominating tabloid headlines, everyone’s obsessed with Victoria and David Beckham’s marriage, and Meg Ryan is back with a new rom-com, What Happens Later, the tale of two exes who run into each other at an airport when their flights are delayed due to a snow storm, prompting them to take a trip down memory lane. Co-starring David Duchovny, and directed and co-written by Ryan herself, the latter is a welcome reminder of the actor’s wit and easy charm in front of the camera—the same qualities that made her the quintessential rom-com heroine two decades ago, in a trio of classic movies which are—dare I say—perfect: 1989’s When Harry Met Sally, 1993’s Sleepless in Seattle, and 1998’s You’ve Got Mail.
Take the former: the Nora Ephron-penned, Rob Reiner-directed two-hander where her turn as an Annie Hall-esque journalist opposite a quippy Billy Crystal took her from relatively unknown performer to America’s sweetheart. In many ways, she fit the mold of the prototypical rom-com heroine—beautiful, smart, sweet, endearing—but she also… didn’t. Her Sally Albright is, as Harry dubs her, “Miss Hospital Corners”—someone who’s hilariously high maintenance and uptight; who breaks down her and Harry’s drive from Chicago to New York into exactly equal shifts behind the wheel; who doesn’t eat between meals and is exacting about her food and drink orders; who puts her letters into the post box one at a time and goes to bed at 7:30pm. She can be prissy and girlish (those “days of the week underpants”), and goofy (her rendition of “The Surrey With the Fringe on Top”), but also surprisingly raunchy (that sandwich scene). She’s outspoken and able to call Harry out on his bullshit. And, in a genre dominated by leading ladies in sexy, floaty summer dresses, she stood out in her cozy knitwear, blazers, and shirting. She was stunning, of course, but more relatable than unattainably glamorous.
A similar combination of introverted bookishness and silly playfulness defines her character in Ephron’s Sleepless in Seattle: Annie Reed, a Baltimore Sun reporter who, despite already being engaged to another man, is intrigued by Tom Hanks’s Sam Baldwin, a recent widower whose eight-year-old son calls into a radio talk show to tell its listeners that his father is lonely and in need of a new wife. Moved to tears by Sam’s description of his former partner, she writes him a note (on a typewriter, while watching An Affair to Remember, obviously) asking to meet on top of the Empire State Building on Valentine’s Day—and her friend sends it on her behalf. Throughout the film, and the pair’s near-miss encounters, she’s captivating, yes, but also anxious and dithering and frequently very funny—she hides in a broom closet to listen to the radio in secret in the middle of the night; and when she finally sees Sam in real life, she panics and flees. She isn’t the rom-com heroine who strides through the city confidently in her high heels—she’s the one who’s swaddled in a big coat, driving her car while singing “Horses, horses, horses, horses” as “Jingle Bells” plays on her speakers.
Still, my favorite Meg Ryan rom-com creation has to be Kathleen Kelly, the wistful bookstore owner in yet another Ephron-helmed cultural touchstone, You’ve Got Mail, who inadvertently falls for Joe Fox, the media tycoon who’s putting her out of business (Tom Hanks again, in an equally cranky and wisecracking role). She waxes lyrical about autumn with her secret online pen pal while ignoring her actual partner; picks up her Starbucks order while bemoaning the death of independent businesses; forgets to vote because she was too busy getting a manicure; and can deliver a withering put-down just as often as she bottles it. In short, she’s a bit all over the place, but in the most wonderful way.
She’s also always in her own world—we see her spotting butterflies on the subway, hanging up a seemingly endless supply of twinkling lights, reading Pride Prejudice on repeat and wiping away tears with a daisy-embroidered handkerchief—and it’s a world others want to inhabit, too. We see that most clearly when she dons a pointed hat to become the Storybook Lady, and reads from Roald Dahl’s Boy: Tales of Childhood to a captive audience of slack-jawed kids. In that moment, she’s pure magic.
On its own, all of this could be annoyingly cutesy, but it’s balanced out by Kathleen’s deep and abiding melancholy. She gets her happy ending with Joe, of course, but the film is also about the passage of time and the heartbreaking realization that even the most beautiful things can’t last forever. She finds love, but she’s forced to close the shop her mother left her and forgo her dream of one day leaving it to her own daughter. “I feel like a part of me has died,” she says as she gazes at the empty shelves. “And my mother has died all over again, and no one can ever make it right.”
When I think of the film now, the scene that first comes to mind isn’t that climactic moment when Kathleen tears up and tells Joe, “I wanted it to be you,” lovely though that scene is. Instead, it’s the moments when she’s alone—the one where Harry Nilsson croons “Remember” as she decorates the Christmas tree in the shop and admits that she misses her mother so much that she can’t breathe; or the one where she contemplates her future. “Sometimes I wonder about my life,” she writes to Joe. “I lead a small life—well, valuable but small. And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book when… shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
That pensiveness which permeates the whole film, the same one we always seem to feel at this time of year as the leaves turn and the temperature plummets, is something that unites all three of these releases—and is the thing that sets Ryan apart from the other prolific rom-com heroine of the ’90s: Julia Roberts.
If the latter, in all her grinning, glossy-haired, ravishingly dressed glory, represents the promise of a warm, wild summer—Pretty Woman’s Vivian going on a sun-drenched shopping spree, My Best Friend’s Wedding’s Julianne kicking back at a baseball game, Anna lying on a park bench with Hugh Grant at the end of Notting Hill, Runaway Bride’s Maggie escaping on horseback—then Ryan, forever curled up in an armchair wearing a cardigan and clutching a cup of cocoa, symbolizes the realities of autumn. While Vivian sings “Kiss” in a sudsy bathtub as she eyes up Richard Gere, a sneezy Kathleen prepares to let Joe into her apartment by putting on a trench coat over her crumpled pajamas, binning her countless used tissues, and hiding her dirty dishes. Roberts is often the woman we want to be, but Ryan is much closer to the one we are.
All of which is to say, there’s no better time than now to light a candle, put on your coziest sweater, grab a steaming hot mug of tea, and settle in on the sofa for a three-part Meg Ryan rom-com marathon, before heading to the theater for her latest release. I promise you, as we hurtle towards winter, there’s nothing more comforting.
