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Sporting a glittering assemblage of all-too familiar ingredients, including Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as the darling contentious couple most likely to sign pre-nuptial agreements before the closing credits, writer-director Nora Ephron's largely synthetic effort has only an ambitious mood and a smattering of sweet moments to recommend it. A bit past the halfway mark of this filmic love affair, the sad realisation sets in; no way is this the real thing. And there's still forty minutes left.
Although crediting Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 film, The Shop Around The Corner, as its pedigreed source of inspiration, structurally the computer-age update more readily recalls Pillow Talk. In that wonderfully fluffy contribution to the genre, songwriter Rock Hudson (Brad Allen a.k.a. Rex Stetson) and interior decorator Doris Day (Jan Morrow) despise each other on the telephone party line they share, but in person are smitten with each other's aliases. In You've Got Mail, buoyed by the security of anonymous computer conversation, Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) and Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) are sweethearts online; neither knows, at least not yet, that in real life they are bitter business enemies.
Ms. Ephron's mostly derivative, traditional-until-it-hurts effort does little more than acknowledge the change from telephone to computers (in the Lubitsch original, the two employees of the same retail establishment are clandestine pen pals) as the medium for their tête-à-tête. That she hardly explores the seriocomic possibilities of secret cyberspace relationships is both a missed opportunity and a sociocultural shame. For all that it matters to the plot, Kathleen and Joe might as well be communicating with quill and parchment. Story twists are trite and formulaic. There is no interesting sub-text worth mentioning. However, as a piece of side business, the fact that both Joe's tycoon dad (Dabney Coleman) and his equally tycoon granddad (John Randolph) have young children does produce a hearty laugh or two about trophy wives and wither goest the American family.
But there are great production values, including fine photography and mood-evoking music. And until you find it out, You've Got Mail's promise of everlasting love delivered in the utopian atmosphere of a culturally vibrant Upper West Side of New York City is seductive. You so much want to like this movie. And at first blush, why shouldn't it work? Meg Ryan as the owner of an haute couture children's bookshop purveying to the carriage trade is the type of dedicated, independent shopkeeper who restores your faith in humanity. But look out! Here comes Tom Hanks as Joe Fox, of Fox Books, as in conglomerate, chain store, discounting, eat-up-all-the competition Fox Books. Well, he'll come around and see the error of his greedy ways, won't he? There's the discrepant rub. And that's where Ms. Ephron's writing and Mr. Hanks's inevitably confused interpretation of the same go askew.
While Mr. Hanks gives it the old college try, his business bully has apparently landed in the wrong film. Sans a character-building epiphany (strangely absent here), by most movie criteria Joe Fox is, in the very least, a distasteful sort. And by the much stricter standards of romantic comedy, he is a villain, whether on line or in person. Hanks comes across more like the fellow the leading lady should be running from rather than to.
Oddly, nay, incongruously, on second thought both would-be lovers seem more properly matched to the respective live-ins they disparage than to each other. Greg Kinnear is droll as Kathleen's beau, Frank, a foppish columnist plying his muckraking wiles at a New York weekly. And icy Parker Posey as a shamelessly self-effacing corporate book-publishing shark is more correctly suited to boyfriend Joe Fox than is lambie pie Kathleen.
A more sophisticated script might have allowed for a philosophical reconciliation between Mr. Fox's business ethics and his heart. Unchecked, the book store bigwig's plans can only prove cataclysmic to the object of his affection. What makes it worse, Ms. Ryan's outdated portrayal of the all-American girl doesn't work in this cut-throat scenario. Anyone this good-natured just has to be a numskull. She is the sorrowful mark, the victim. It doesn't look good on her, and it makes us feel bad.
More curious, You've Got Mail is surprisingly short on the love quotient. What wooing goes on is woefully bereft of convincing sentiment. Ephron peppers the tale with the fanciful earmarks of the attempted genre, like one inspired scene when an infatuated Kathleen is treated to the dance of a butterfly on the subway. But lip service does not a romantic comedy make.
Searing, avante garde ruminations are doubtfully the filmmaker's intent. Admittedly, she was just trying to breathe new life into an old affaire de coeur. But inadvertently, perhaps even subconsciously, Ms. Ephron's half-baked script is declaring that these are the commerce-driven 90's; if you want love, accept it according to the prevailing realities. Well.....we'll do no such thing, thank you. With doings this antiseptic, one imagines that even the extraterrestrial Mr. Spock could have penned a more amorous screenplay. As it stands, You've Got Mail just doesn't get the message right.
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