Review: You've Got Mail (1998)
Jason Wallis
Rating (out of five): ***1/2
Starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Parker Posey, Greg Kinnear, Jean Stapleton,
Steve Zahn, Dabney Coleman,
John Randolph and Debra Eisenstadt
Directed by Nora Ephron
Rated PG for mild profanity
Theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1
Released in 1998
Running 119 minutes
You've Got Mail works alot better than it deserves to. In order to make the
film a success, all they had to do was cast two extremely popular and
attractive stars, have them share the screen for about two hours and then
collect the profits. No real acting was involved and there is not an
original or inventive bone in it's body (it's basically a complete re-shoot
of The Shop Around the Corner, only adding a few modern twists).
Essentially, it goes against and defies all concepts of good contemporary
filmmaking. It's overly sentimental and at times terribly mushy, not to
mention very manipulative. But oh, how enjoyable that manipulation is.
But there must be something other than the casting and manipulation that
makes the movie work as well as it does, because I absolutely hated the
previous Ryan/Hanks teaming, Sleepless in Seattle. It couldn't have been
the directing, because both films were helmed by the same woman. I haven't
quite yet figured out what I liked so much about You've Got Mail, but then
again, is that really important? If you like something so much, why even
question it?
Again, the storyline is as cliched as they come. Tom Hanks plays Joe Fox,
the insanely likeable owner of a discount book chain and Meg Ryan plays
Kathleen Kelley, the even more insanely likeable proprietor of a family-run
children's book shop called, in a nice homage, The Shop Around the Corner.
Fox and Kelley soon become bitter rivals because the new Fox Books store is
opening up right across the block from the small business. Little do they
know, they are already in love with each other over the internet, only
neither party knows the other person's true identity.
The rest of the story isn't important because all it does is serve as a
mere backdrop for the two stars to share the screen. Sure, there are some
mildly interesting subplots, but they all fail in comparison to the utter
cuteness of the main relationship.
All of this, of course, leads up to the predictable climax. But as
foreseeable as the ending is, it's so damn cute and well-done that I doubt
any movie in the entire year contains a scene the evokes as much pure joy
as this part does. When Ryan discovers the true identity of her online
love, I was filled with such, for lack of a better word, happiness that for
the first time all year, I actually left the theater smiling.
*Homepage at http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Boulevard/7475
**Complimentary movie ticket courtesy of Valley Cinemas at
http://www.movie-tickets.com
Copyright 1998 Jason Wallis
James Sanford
In the world of writer-director Nora Ephron, everyone is witty, well-read,
well-educated about movies, and a hopeless romantic ... everyone who matters
anyhow. Characters who don't meet those qualifications are almost certain to
end up on the sidelines.
So it is with "You've Got Mail," in which Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks play
E-mail correspondents who share an intimate, anonymous relationship on-line,
punctuated by references to "Pride and Prejudice" (from her) and "The
Godfather" (from him). In cyberspace, they're Shopgirl and NY152; in
business, they're Kathleen Kelly and Joe Fox, rival bookstore owners who
begin feuding when Joe builds one of his Fox Books megastores steps away
from Kathleen's childrens' literature emporium The Shop Around The Corner, a
New York staple for 42 years.
Neither Joe nor Kathleen knows who they're writing to, since they met in a
chatroom and have been intentionally vague about their identities. Thus,
they have no clue they're spilling their deepest secrets to someone they
regard as an enemy.
If you thought Hanks and Ryan were endearing in their previous teamings in
"Sleepless In Seattle" and "Joe Versus the Volcano," you ain't seen nothing
yet. "Mail" allows them to work up a bit of friction and to hurl a few
zingers at each other, yet neither star has ever seemed more appealing. Even
when he's being snide, Hanks manages to retain his cuddliness, and though
Ephron pushes the "cute" button a bit vigorously with too many shots of
Ryan's shadowboxing -- she looks about as tough as the Robber Kitten -- no
director makes Ryan look lovelier than Ephron.
The dialogue is predictably punchy, with the best lines charitably divided
amongst all the movie's major players, including Parker Posey as Joe's
girlfriend, a power-mad publisher who notes when an associate dies, it
"makes one less person I'm not speaking to," and Greg Kinnear as Kathleen's
beau, a columnist whose language can be best described as over the top.
"You're a lone reed, standing tall, waving boldly in the corrupt sands of
commerce," he gushes as Kathleen organizes her crusade against Fox.
Although one of the biggest laughs from the audience came when they saw how
easily and quickly Kathleen and Joe accessed America On-Line, "Mail" also
features a wonderfully weird joke about Joe's relatives, a welcome
appearance by Steve Zahn as one of Kathleen's slightly daft employees, and a
terrific set-piece involving Kathleen's embarassment in a check-out line;
it's easily the sharpest scene of this type since Debra Winger's similar
run-in with a haughty clerk in "Terms of Endearment." So smooth and engaging
is "Mail" that even when its plot stalls it doesn't seem like time is being
wasted. If everyone on the Internet were this much fun to spend time with as
these characters, no one would ever log off.
James Sanford
jba...@earthling.net
A movie review by Joe Barlow
(c) Copyright 1999
STARRING: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Parker Posey, Greg Kinnear
DIRECTOR: Nora Ephron
WRITERS: Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron
RATED: PG
YEAR: 1998
SEEN AT: Starlite Theater, Charlotte NC
RATING: *** (out of a possible *****)
"You've Got Mail," the new Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan extravaganza,
strikes a chord somewhere between 'engaging romantic comedy' and
'shameless product placement,' with very little manuvering room on
either side. Not since "The Wizard," the late '80s film starring
Fred Savage and a bunch of Nintendo games, have I seen a movie so
determined to inspire consumer spending (in this case, the America
Online service). It's one thing to have a character use a real-world
product in a film; it's quite another to have the film grind to a halt
while the product is shamelessly promoted by the characters.
It's true that product placement, the process by which
vendors pay movie studios big bucks to get their wares up on the
screen for a fleeting moment or two, is a neccessary evil, allowing
the studios to offset the cost of shooting their latest $100 million
blockbuster. If Hollywood can make an additional million dollars by
having Bruce Willis wear an Adidas cap in one scene, they're gonna
go for it. I can understand this practice (even if I don't like it)
in an expensive effects-laden film. I'm less eager to accept it in a
romantic comedy. There are no special-effects costs to offset here.
Joe Fox (Hanks) and Kathleen Kelly (Ryan) are both booksellers
in modern-day Manhattan. Kelly is the owner of The Shop Around the
Corner, an intimate childrens' bookstore founded by her mother, which
has been serving the New York community for thirty years. The store
is Kelly's passion: she knows every customer by name, and is
intimately familiar with each and every book on her shelves. Nothing
gives her greater joy than helping a customer find just the right
selection.
Joe is the manager of Fox Books, a mammoth Barnes and
Noble-type retail outlet which opens down the street from Kathleen's
store. Soon the new arrival has usurped all her old business, and The
Shop Around the Corner teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. Seeking
advice and reassurance, Kelly turns to the same place many people go
when they seek comfort: cyberspace.
For quite a while, Kathleen has been corresponding with a
friendly guy she met in an AOL (America Online, for the uninitiated)
chat room. Over the past several weeks they've become good friends,
but they have one unusual stipulation in their friendship: they don't
want to share any personal information with each other, including
their real names. They address each other only be their handles
(Kathleen is SHOPGIRL; he is NY152). Naturally, Kathleen's e-mail
buddy turns out to be none other than Joe Fox, her arch-enemy in
real-life. The rest of the film chronicles their adventures as the
two engage in their inevitable descent into amour.
Forgetting the issue of product placement, the biggest problem
I had with this movie is the lack of intimacy on the part of our two
protaganists. Surely anyone who is as smitten as both Hanks and
Ryan's characters are would not be content to keep their e-mail on
such a cold, distant level, never opening up or revealing any personal
details about themselves. (In fact, I question whether people truly
*can* become infatuated with each other when no personal details are
known. Perhaps in real life, when physical beauty can make up for a
lack of information, but not in cyberspace. Let me know your thoughts
on this subject, dear readers.) The fact that they refuse to share
anything personal about each other, even their real names, positively
reeks of "forced plot contrivance"; ie, a screenplay that forces its
characters to do something that makes little or no sense, simply
because there would otherwise be no story.
Director/co-writer Nora Ephron, who also worked with Hanks and
Ryan in "Sleepless in Seattle," based her screenplay on the Jimmy
Stewart classic, "The Shop Around the Corner" (in which the two
characters fall in love via postal letters, rather than e-mail). If
her screenplay is a little heavy-handed at times, her direction is
quite adequate, and she coaxes strong, confident performances from the
entire cast. Particularly fun is Parker Posey ("The House of Yes"),
who appears briefly as Hanks' girlfriend. Greg Kinnear also appears
as Ryan's sweetheart, and is entertaining with his character's
puffed-up self importance.
"You've Got Mail" is neither the best or worst of the current
crop of holiday films. Occasionally simple-minded and perhaps fifteen
minutes too long, it is nonetheless light-hearted, and admittedly kind
of fun (particularly after Hanks discovers Ryan's identity, and
chooses to keep her in the dark a while longer). Significantly, this
movie is one of the few non-animated films in recent memory to earn a
family-friendly PG rating. And I hate to adopt the cliche', but I'm
hard-pressed to think of a better 'date' movie.
********************************************************************
Copyright (c)1999 by Joe Barlow. This review may not be reproduced
without the written consent of the author.
E-Mail: jba...@earthling.net
Joe Barlow on Film: http://www.ipass.net/~jbarlow/film.htm
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Frann Michel
Summary :
You’ve Got Mail is the latest romantic comedy directed by Nora Ephron,
and starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, and is an update of the 1940 film
The Shop Around the Corner. Ryan plays Cathleen Kelley, owner of a
children’s bookstore started by her mother, and called "The Shop Around
the Corner"; Hanks plays Joe Fox, grandson in the firm of Fox & Sons,
which is about to open a mega-book mart literally around the corner
(think Borders or Barnes & Noble). Meanwhile, the two have also been
carrying on an anonymous email romance they keep secret from their
respective partners—Greg Kinnear as a pompous luddite political
columnist, and Parker Posey woefully underused as a book editor who
"makes coffee nervous." When Hanks drops in at the children’s
bookstore one day with his eight year old aunt (his grandfather’s
daughter) and his 4 year old half brother (product of his father’s
latest romance), some romantic sparks fly between the leads, and he
declines to tell her his last name, keeping secret his role as the
competition. At first, Kelley thinks Fox books won’t affect her
business, and she certainly has no principled objection to large
corporations (both protagonists get their morning coffee at Starbuck’s,
and the movie has been described as an infomercial for AOL). But when
her shop starts to suffer, she mounts a publicity campaign against the
commercial giant, and the two booksellers become increasingly
antagonistic off-line, even as he gives her business advice on-line.
When they arrange to meet, he doesn’t tell her that he is, in fact, the
man she’s been corresponding with. After she closes her shop because of
plummeting sales, he continues to woo her both via email and in person.
By the time she has begun writing a children’s book, and acknowledges
that change is all for the best, both have broken up with their previous
partners, and they finally kiss at the film’s conclusion.
Critique:
You’ve Got Mail has gotten mixed reviews—one paper titled theirs
"You’ve Got Treacle"—but even those less than enthusiastic have tended
to neglect the politics of the film. We are in an era of increasing
corporate consolidation that is reshaping media as well as other
capitalist enterprises—Disney owns ABC, Time Warner owns Turner
Broadcasting, and Bertelsmann, the German-based owner of Bantam
Doubleday Dell, has signed an agreement to buy Random House. This
makes the German based company the largest publisher of English-language
books in the world, controlling 25% of adult trade publishing in the US
. Such major corporate mergers tend to result in a significant decline
in the number of "midlist" titles published and a decline in the
diversity of titles and voices published (Feminist Bookstore News Spring
1998). Moreover, in 1998 the ABA (American Booksellers Association) and
a number of independent bookstores filed a lawsuit against Borders and
Barnes & Noble, charging unfair and illegal business practices. Among
other problems, the suit notes that as chain superstores gain dominance,
book prices rise: Barnes & Noble and Borders no longer offer discounts
on most books, and their business practices—including insistence on
special deals and slow payment— drive up the list price of books from
which any discount is calculated. A serious issue in the consolidation
of media, then, is the narrowing of the range and accessibility of
written discourse. In You’ve Got Mail, however, the only real
criticism offered of the superstore is that the salespeople it hires are
insufficiently knowledgeable—a problem easily remedied by hiring some
of those thrown out of work by the competition.
Moreover, even the movie’s transient nostalgia for small business
obscures the fact that as a capitalist enterprise it is by definition
exploitive, extracting surplus labor from writers, printers, bindery
workers, and so on. The film is accurate, at least, in its suggestion
that the logic of capitalism means that books are commodities, and the
unchecked market leads to increasing monopolization. You’ve Got Mail
resembles other recent cinematic representations of corporate growth in
feminizing the small business (a children’s bookstore founded by a woman
and run by her daughter) and masculinizing the large corporation.
Moreover, although Fox & Sons is a family business of sorts, the
repeated marriages and late-in-life childrearing of grandfather and
father Fox indicates their failure in stable family values. Joe,
however, is evidently supposed to be humanized by his discovery of a
soulmate in the incredibly sweet Cathleen Kelley. (Even after he’s
driven her out of business, she feels guilty about speaking harshly to
him.) He also has a friendly dog and a black buddy/employee, and his
seductive powers are never problematized. Early in the film, he talks
with the manager of the not yet open superstore, and points out that
they will seduce the customers. Later, he charms an irritated grocery
clerk, and ultimately, of course, charms Kelley. She offers no
objection to the discovery that he has known for the last third of the
film that she is the "Shopgirl" of their email correspondence, and has
withheld that information (surely an unfair if not illegal romantic
practice). And of course, she completely forgives him for his business
practices.
Love trumps politics. The Greg Kinnear character (the journalist
boyfriend) is the only one who seems to express any political views, and
is something of a buffoon. Ryan’s character, in contrast, reports that
she forgot to vote in the last election because she was getting a
manicure. The small store’s bookkeeper, played by Jean Stapleton,
reports blandly that she had an affair with Franco in the 1960s. Even a
fascist dictator, apparently, can be lovable (what’s next? Pinochet as
romantic hero?).
Joe quotes The Godfather as the source of all wisdom, but the idea that
capitalism is organized crime is neglected in favor of the cuteness of
his love of cinema. Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice is used as a
justification for her forgiveness of him, and indeed, that novel is
ultimately about the heroine’s insertion into the property structure.
In the 1940 Shop Around the Corner, on which You’ve Got Mail is based,
the Jimmy Stewart character is senior clerk at Matusheks’ leather-good
store. He doesn’t want to hire Margaret Sullavan; but she sells a
cigarette-case/music box that the owner particularly likes, so Matushek
hires her. The story is set in Budapest, and there is discussion among
the shop employees of how bad the economy is, how hard it is to find a
job, and how much they need to keep the jobs they have. (The shop’s
record business on Christmas eve is described as the best since 1928. )
Sullavan, however, hopes soon to quit working and to marry her anonymous
penpal, whom she doesn’t realize is Stewart, with whom she has a
conflicted relationship at work. He, too, hopes to marry his anonymous
penpal, with whom he corresponds on cultural topics, to improve himself,
because he couldn’t afford an encyclopedia. But he realizes he needs a
better salary if he is going to raise a family. Matushek, the fatherly
owner, mistakenly thinks Stewart is having an affair with his wife,
though it’s really a different salesman. He gets fired, and Sullavan
calls him an insignificant little clerk (a castration to which Hanks is
never subject). The owner learns the truth and makes a suicide attempt
(his wife has chosen someone he would not respect or desire; he has
wrongfully cast off his surrogate son—he later observes that the shop is
his real home, where he has lived most of his life, and, alone on
chistmas eve, takes out to dinner the new errand boy Rudy, who is alone
in the city, too). Jimmy Stewart gets rehired and promoted to
manager; Pepe the errand boy is promoted to clerk; the philanderer is
fired (he has somehow "two-timed" the company; in cuckolding the boss he
has been unfaithful to his job). After the penpals plan to meet in
the café, Stewart sends a letter saying he’d seen her with such a
handsome man he stayed away; he tells her he’s met the letter-writer,
who’s fat, unemployed and ready to live on her salary rather than to
support her. She confesses she really liked Jimmy Stewart and was mean
to him only because she’d recently read a novel where the heroine, an
actress at the comedie francaise, is cruel to men and they all fall in
love with her—but she realizes her mistake was that she works not at the
comedie francaise but at Matushek’s leather goods store. In The Shop
Around the Corner, then, the central conflict is maintining masculinity
and the masculine role of provider in an unstable economy.
In You’ve Got Mail, the protagonists are competitors rather than
coworkers—a nod to women’s independent entrepreneurship, perhaps. But
Kelley thinks that her life running the bookstore has been "small"—as
though the breadth of experience can be measured by the volume of
trade. Closing the bookstore is, she comments, like reliving her
mother’s death, and the film thus suggests that women’s oedipal move
from the world of the mother to that of the fathers is a healthy and
necessary development—even if the father has, figuratively, killed the
mother. Only by accepting and forgiving that loss can she move on to
marriage and, implicitly, to having a daughter of her own. In turning
to writing children’s books, she becomes a kind of independent
entrepreneur (though we never get to the questions of publication and
distribution), suggesting that those put out of business by large
corporations can always turn to a kind of self-employment.
Nora Ephron has apparently said in interviews that the US is no longer a
class society—and judging from the invisibility in this movie of
unemployment, poverty, and low-paid wage work, one might think she is
right. But the portrait of the unionization battle of Borders employees
in Michael Moore’s documentary The Big One tells a different story.
Homer Yen
by Homer Yen
(c) 1998
I’ve come to notice that I have a small defensive mechanism that
occasionally pops up when a stranger approaches me. Invariably, I
immediately make a subtle course change and try to discretely add some
distance between the other person and me as we pass one another. If
this oncoming person looks suspicious, you can bet that I’ll veer even
further from my path. Maybe by doing this, I am cheating myself out of
an encounter that would have been infinitely fulfilling. I guess, in a
sense, this is why technology and the internet is bringing our world
closer together. By accessing some of these online chat rooms, for
example, it affords us a chance to talk freely with others with out
the humility of revealing our identities. It also offers the failsafe
mechanism of turning off the computer if you feel that you’ve
attracted one of the many weirdoes out in cyberspace. But maybe - just
maybe - you might actually find someone that you can feel as
comfortable with as your favorite fuzzy blanket.
Take Kathleen (Meg Ryan) and Joe (Tom Hanks). To each other in the
online world, they are best friends who are intent to preserve their
anonymity. When they are online, their lives become a rich tapestry of
conversation whose long talks about nothing allow them to reveal more
than any real face-to-face conversation ever could. Late at night or
early in the morning, when they are not in the busy nine-to-five mode,
they nestle up to their computers secretly wishing that they were
nestling with one another. They flirt, confide in one another, and
even contemplate meeting. But sometimes, relationships like these are
better left a fantasy. The cold, hard reality of this seemingly cute
bond is that in real life, they are actually enemies. Kathleen owns a
small but wonderful children’s bookstore. She has a heart of gold and
is a romantic in every sense of the word. But everything that she has
worked for is being threatened when Joe’s company builds a
Border’s-like superstore just around the block. Despite the fact that
I would just about hate anyone that drove me out of business, Tom
Hanks and Meg Ryan are infectiously cute. The way Ryan rolls her baby
blue eyes as she confesses her inner thoughts or the way Hanks bobs
his head left and right as he searches for just the right words are
real gems. And because these two are so affable, and because we’re
interested in what these two have to say to each other (they mostly
talk about basically mundane things and offer small snippets of wisdom
to one another), we are engrossed with the idea of them meeting. What
will happen when they discover whom their online pen pal really is?
Where will the story go from there? And this is what really allowed me
to enjoy the film. I was never sure where the story would quite go.
And whether they actually got together or not didn’t really matter
because in the end, I just enjoyed the characters so much that I would
have been happy no matter what their outcome.
Grade: B+
_________________________________________________________
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Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Jon Popick
˝), Nora Ephron’s uneven re-pairing of Sleepless in Seattle lovebirds
Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Surprisingly empty and enormously light, Mail is
anchored only by the presence of its two huge stars.
Once past the nifty computer-generated opening of a virtual New York
City, viewers will be introduced to the two main characters. Ryan is
Kathleen Kelly, an endlessly perky and chipper owner of a small
children’s book store. Hanks plays Joe Fox, the puffy-faced owner of a
huge chain of successful bookstores (a la Barnes and Noble) that is
opening its new outlet around the corner and intends to run Kelly’s shop
out of business. They unknowingly met in a chat room (before the film
starts) and have been communicating via e-mail for months…but neither
knows who their pen-pal really is.
The rest of the story unfolds so predictably unimaginative that it
actually rivals Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit in terms of a sheer lack
of originality. Essentially a remake of The Shop Around the Corner, the
1946 Jimmy Stewart/Margaret Sullavan classic, Mail plods along at
powerfully sluggish two-hour pace that is about 30 minutes too long for
fare this shallow and slight. Nobody that has been to the movies in the
past forty years should be entertained by this film or surprised by its
outcome.
Hanks’ phoned-in performance is particularly vacant and reminiscent of
Harrison Ford’s wooden turn in Sabrina, while Ryan is, as always, a
pleasure to watch. His charm is turned down to around “3” and hers is
cranked up to about “12”. Mail will likely draw many comparisons to
Seattle – a film about two love-hungry adults that fall for each other
site unseen.
Why did the studio honchos think that the average American needed to see
a flick so similar that they actually enlisted the same stars? The
answer is simple – money. Hanks and Ryan are huge box office draws.
Why? Because he’s the type of guy that men want to be, and she is the
girl that most women secretly wish they were (but will never ever
admit…ever).
Mail also boasts an amazing cast of co-stars – Greg Kinnear, Jean
Stapleton, Dave Chappelle and Dabney Coleman capably handle their roles,
but Steve Zahn and indie-goddess Parker Posey stand out in their smaller
parts. How does a film pay for this many stars of this magnitude? The
answer is simple – product placement. Prepare to have America Online,
Starbucks, Apple and Microsoft products shoved in your face for a full
two hours.
I have a few suggestions for better plots; the most obvious being a more
realistic story of two people who meet on the Internet. He would be a
400-pound unemployed Star Trek fan pretending to be a successful
businessman, while she would say that she resembles Cindy Crawford but
would actually turn out to be a man. Oh, yeah, and he would be a serial
killer, too. The tagline would be “Life Is Like A Box Of Chocolates.”
Other suggestions include You’ve Got Herpes – a madcap comedy
(presumably starring either Pauly Shore or Charlie Sheen) about a guy
who has a drunken one-time sexual encounter with a girl he meets on the
Internet and wakes up with genital warts and a white, clumpy discharge.
The rest of the film would be a hilarious romp as the Shore/Sheen
character tried to track down the one-night stand, who would also turn
out to be a serial killer. Tagline – “This Christmas, Pornography Isn’t
The Only Thing Brad Flaherty Downloads.”
Or You’ve Got Cancer – a bittersweet drama, directed by David Lynch,
about a Willy Loman-type travelling salesman who neglects his family and
dies of prostate cancer. Things take a surreal turn when, one year
after his death, the soul of the salesman is transferred to the toilet
brush in his family’s downstairs bathroom. The brush tries to be a
better father to his two small children, but fails miserably as the
children grow so frightened of him that they develop a psychological
fear of the bathroom and must be hospitalized for severe constipation.
Tragically, when the family returns home from the hospital, they find
the brush hanging from a pipe on the bathroom ceiling. Then the two
kids would grow up to be serial killers. Tagline – “Frank Schwartz
Thought His Life Was Bad…Until He Died.”
How about You’ve Got Conjoined Twin Myslexia – the big-screen debut of
television’s South Park centers around the origins of the two-faced
school nurse. The kids would get to use dirtier words, Cartman’s
manhood would be revealed, Stan would be a serial killer and Kenny would
die in every reel. Tagline – “Give Us Your Money; It’s South Park!”
Actually, You’ve Got anything (except Mail) would have been an
improvement.
You’ve Got Mail (1:59) is rated PG for some very mild language and some
adult situations.
Luke Buckmaster
Reviewed by Luke Buckmaster
Cast: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Greg Kinnear, David Chappelle, Dabney
Coleman, Parker Posey, Jean Stapleton, Steve Zahn
Director: Nora Ephron
Screenplay: Nora Ephron & Delia Ephron
Australian theatrical release: December 26, 1998
On the Buckmaster scale of 0 stars (bomb), to 5 stars (a masterpiece):
2 stars
At this point in time, no director has been able to make standard
computer screens look interesting in a movie. I'm not talking about
spooky virtual reality (Disclosure) or warped cyber space (Hackers); I
mean actual, I-got-it-at-Dick-Smith screens. You may remember when
Whoopi Goldberg energetically conversed on an ancient computer in
Jumping Jack Flash, or when Tom Cruise battered away on a laptop for a
brief period in Mission: Impossible. There is just nothing interesting
about watching somebody read text off a screen, just so they can say it
out loud to save the audience from reading it themselves.
What is interesting is the prospect of finding love on the Internet.
There is a number of intriguing ideas which could have been developed in
You've Got Mail - having a chat room as a metaphor of society, examining
the net as a means to escape modern life, or how the online world is
just as vulnerable as the real world. But director Nora Ephron's
(Sleepless in Seattle) only intention is to keep the film smaltzy and
simplistic. She avoids any opportunity to study the medium in which the
film's protagonists use to communicate; instead, she studies the
protagonists themselves. Ordinarily that would be fine, but Tom Hank's
character is boring, ditto for Meg Ryan's.
Two Internet geeks converse over email and chat rooms, and eventually
discover that they are in love with each other. But these are not geeks
who wear thick rimmed glasses and are twenty pounds overweight - they
are in the cute form of Joe Fox (Hanks) and Kathleen Kelly (Ryan). Fox
owns Manhattan's largest book chain, and when he opens a new superstore
it threatens to destroy Kelly's small bookstore "The Shop Around the
Corner." In "real life," these two are sworn enemies, but over the
Internet - unaware of who they are conversing with - they share intimate
details of their lives.
So what we have is a film with uninteresting central characters, no
opportunities to explore their obsessive usage of email, and a film as
meaningful as a Pamela Anderson home movie. If not for a few strong
(but repressed) performances and some occasional touching moments,
You've Got Mail could have easily infected the holiday season with the
Very Bad Filmmaking virus. Although, it must be said that some viewers
will have no problem enjoying the central romance (judging from the
squealing girls sitting in front of me, I'd say it would be most enjoyed
by females aged 12-18), and for most, You've Got Mail will be hard to
hate. For me, it was hard to like.
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