"Romantic comedy a little too perfect?"

by Jesse Gale

NEW YORK, 6 January 1999 - Director Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally) has surely cranked out another hit. With You’ve Got Mail, Ephron constructs warm personal moments ably, but does her business-like efficiency chill the film’s snuggly charms?

The plot whirrs along without a hitch: Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) engages in an e-mail correspondence with Joe Fox (Tom Hanks). They plumb each other’s souls via the internet, but personal details are off limits - thus, neither knows that they are business rivals.

Kathleen’s business is "The Shop around the Corner," a children’s bookstore where fables are read aloud and each tiny customer is treated with care; Joe’s business is an impersonal mega-store in the same Upper West Side neighborhood proffering "cut rate books and legal, addictive stimulants." The movie focuses throughout on the distinction between the two stores, and the boundaries between business and personal spaces. Where do we want to be personal with others? Nameless, in internet chat rooms? Named and known, in cheery shops with wooden moldings?

Those questions are worth asking: why are there professional "greeters" at chain clothing stores? Why are there so many choices at Starbucks - how do those corporate decisions make individuals feel treated more personally? But those questions can be put to You’ve Got Mail's audience too.

The canny, market-researched sheen of this "date movie" aims to focus its demographic’s fumbled private lives; but can one respond to a machine-made glow? The truth is, I didn’t. The movie’s fuzziness was flawlessly engineered, but its very flawlessness seemed, to me, off-putting. Meg Ryan’s cuteness seems to be on auto-pilot. Tom Hanks’s performance hadn’t a third the depth of his more interesting work (this year's Saving Private Ryan, for example).

Greg Kinnear and Parker Posey, playing the unsuitable partners of the leads, are each winning - Kinnear especially so - but neither holds surprises. The Upper West Side looks sparkly and smart... but the perfectly measured ingredients of cast, location, and rom-com (romantic comedy) didn't, for me, conjure the emotions they were engineered to produce. For me, romance needs to be more personal; it needs to be about people.

You've Got Mail is precisely what a date movie should be - and precisely what it shouldn’t be. It’s the perfectly bland background music for a meeting with someone new, a shrink-wrapped tin of warmth. There is no danger to this film, except the danger that it would set the tone -- smarmy and dull -- for the rest of the date. The film doesn't push its audience to open their hearts to something new, and without that a romantic comedy (and a date) are a wasted night.