8 / 10
Official trailer
You’ve Got Mail is a good, warm, well-made romantic comedy, and I enjoyed it when I saw it. Nora Ephron wrote it with her sister Delia and directed it, taking the plot of Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner and moving it onto the internet of 1998.
Tom Hanks plays Joe Fox, heir to a chain of superstores. Meg Ryan plays Kathleen Kelly, who runs the children’s bookshop her mother started. They loathe each other in person and have been writing to each other anonymously online for months.
It cost about $65 million and made roughly $250 million. It’s an 8: charming, extremely well cast, and a little too gentle with its own premise. Hanks and Ryan could read a grocery list together and I’d stay for it, and Ephron gives them far better than a grocery list. My one real gripe, and it’s a big one for an 8, is that the movie watches a small bookshop die and then asks me to root for the man who killed it.
The Setup
Kathleen runs The Shop Around the Corner on the Upper West Side, a small store that hand-sells picture books to children whose parents were brought there by their parents. Fox Books opens a few blocks away with discount stacks, a coffee bar and unlimited money.
Both of them are in relationships they aren’t enjoying, and both have an anonymous correspondent they can’t stop thinking about. Neither knows the other is on the other end. Joe works it out first, halfway through the film, and says nothing. From that point he’s courting her in person while reading her heartbroken emails about a man she’s never met, and the story gets more interesting than its reputation suggests.
Hanks and Ryan
This was the third Hanks and Ryan pairing after Joe Versus the Volcano and Sleepless in Seattle, and they’re completely at ease with each other. The film relies on that. Very little happens, and you watch it because you like the people.
Hanks has the harder job. Joe Fox is the villain of his own love story, a man whose business is crushing hers, and Hanks plays him charming enough to be forgiven without ever pretending he’s innocent.
Ryan is doing the thing she was the best in the world at in the 1990s: bright, quick, slightly flustered, and able to turn on a dime into real hurt. The scene where she finally tells Joe exactly what she thinks of him, then regrets it immediately, is the best acting in the film.
That blowup and the regret right behind it is the scene I’d hand anyone who doubts Ryan’s range. She gets cruelty and shame to arrive within seconds of each other, and the film is never better.
Nora Ephron
Ephron came to directing from journalism and screenwriting, and her dialogue always sounds like people who read. The characters here quote Pride and Prejudice and The Godfather, argue about coffee orders, and talk the way clever New Yorkers talk in her films whether or not anyone talks that way in life. She had already written When Harry Met Sally and written and directed Sleepless in Seattle. This is the last of the three, the most comfortable and the least sharp, and the one most people put on when they want company.
Her New York is an edited version: brownstones, street markets, autumn leaves, no garbage. It’s a fantasy, and she’s not pretending otherwise.
For Writers
Ephron’s characters sound like people who read books, argue about small things, and can’t resist a good line. Voice on the page comes from specific taste and specific irritations. When you write dialogue, give each character a set of opinions they can’t keep to themselves and let those opinions leak into unrelated conversations. List three things your character can’t shut up about. Work one into a scene where it has nothing to do with the plot.
The Bookstore Problem
The film’s central tension is that a man destroys a woman’s family business and then marries her. Ephron knows it, and has Kathleen say it out loud, and then lets the romance win anyway. That’s the film’s biggest weakness, and nothing else here undercuts the romance as badly. Fox Books swallows her shop, her staff scatter, and the story treats it as a sad but necessary modernization, with a line about how his stores are fine, really, and the coffee is good. I’d have given Kathleen one scene where the loss costs Joe something.
Twenty-five years on, that reading is harder to take. The chain stores that killed the independents were themselves killed by Amazon, and the film’s confidence that progress is friendly looks like a period detail.
For Writers
Ephron gives her hero the one job guaranteed to hurt her heroine, then makes the audience like him anyway. A love story gets stronger when the obstacle between the couple is something one of them is doing on purpose. When you write romance, look for a conflict that comes from your characters’ choices and not from a misunderstanding or an ex. Write down what keeps your couple apart. If it would evaporate the moment they told each other the truth, it’s a delay, and readers can feel the difference.
1998 on Screen
The film is now a documentary about a vanished internet. Dial-up modems, AOL, the Windows startup chime, waiting until you get home to check whether anyone wrote to you. That delay is the whole romantic engine, and it doesn’t exist anymore. The film’s tension depends on messages arriving hours apart and on two people being unable to find out who the other is. Both are now impossible.
It gives the film an accidental sweetness. Watching it today is a bit like reading letters, and that’s exactly what Lubitsch’s version was doing in 1940 with the mail.
The Supporting Cast
Greg Kinnear plays Kathleen’s boyfriend, a self-important columnist typing on a manual typewriter, and Parker Posey plays Joe’s girlfriend at a speed that suggests she’s in a much faster film. Both are written to be dropped.
Jean Stapleton is lovely as Birdie, Kathleen’s oldest employee, and gets the film’s best piece of advice. Dave Chappelle, before everything else he became, plays Joe’s colleague and friend.
Steve Zahn and Heather Burns are the bookshop staff, and the film’s fondness for a store where people know what they’re selling is completely convincing. Ephron liked bookshops, and it shows.
Stapleton’s Birdie is my favorite thing in the movie after the two leads. Parker Posey is so much fun that I wish Ephron hadn’t written her purely as somebody to be discarded.
Where It Sits
It’s the softest of the Ephron romantic comedies, with less bite than When Harry Met Sally and less melancholy than Sleepless in Seattle. Almost nothing in it hurts for long.
That softness is why people keep rewatching it. It’s an autumn film, full of coffee, bouquets of sharpened pencils and Manhattan streets that look like a catalog. It’s an 8 because the cast, the dialogue and the warmth get it past a premise it’s too kind to prosecute.
For Writers
You’ve Got Mail keeps the plot of a 1940 film and changes only the technology the letters travel through, and it works because the emotional machinery was never about the mail. A story structure can outlive the medium it was built for. When you adapt or borrow an old plot, identify the human mechanism underneath it and rebuild the surface around today’s equivalent. Take a story you love and strip it to its mechanism in one sentence. Then ask what would produce the same delay, secrecy or distance now. The mechanism is the part worth keeping.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Ephron’s best trick here is that her hero knows the secret for half the film and the heroine doesn’t. That gap gives every scene two layers: what Kathleen thinks is happening and what Joe is doing about it. Let one character know something the other doesn’t, and ordinary conversations start doing double duty.
Is You’ve Got Mail worth watching?
Yes. It’s funny, warm and beautifully cast, and Hanks and Ryan have the kind of chemistry that carries a film with very little plot. The New York it shows is half fantasy and entirely pleasant to spend two hours in.
It’s an 8, and I’m happy with that number. I’d give the leads, the dialogue and Ephron’s pencil-and-autumn-leaves New York full marks. The two points come off because the film lets Joe Fox off the hook for what his stores do to Kathleen, and a romance this smart should have made him pay a little more before it let him win her.
