You've Got Mail

Thanksgiving is here once again, so that means it is time to look at another Thanksgiving classic. Today, we will look at the 1998 romantic comedy, “You’ve Got Mail.”

The charm of “You’ve Got Mail” is as old as love and as new as the Internet. It has Tom Hanks and the great Meg Ryan as incredibly likable people whose task is to show their likability for two hours, while we really want them to solve their problems, confess how they feel for one another and get on with their future filled with love.

They meet in a chat room on AOL, and they’re telling personal secrets (but no personal facts) in each day and even hourly e-mail sessions. Roger Ebert said in his review, “The movie's call to arms is the inane chirp of the maddening "You've Got Mail!" Voice (which prompts me to growl, "Yes, and I'm gonna stick it up your modem!").” However, the e-mail is simply a MacGuffin – the device needed to keep two people who fall in love online from knowing they already know and hate each other in reality.

Ebert said, “The plot surrounds Hanks and Ryan not only with e-mail lore, but with the Yuppie Urban Lifestyle.” It’s one of those movies where the characters enter Starbucks and we don’t really point “product placement!” because, sadly, we can’t think them anywhere else. Where the generations are confused by current loving desires that Joe Fox (Hanks’ character) can walk into a bookstore with two young children (Hallee Hirsh and Jeffrey Scaperrotta) and introduce them as his brother and his aunt (“Matt is my father’s son, and Annabel is my grandfather’s daughter”).

Meg Ryan’s character, Kathleen, has taken over the children’s book shop that was left to her from her mother. She and her staff read all the books, know all the customers, and give full service and love. Joe Fox is the third generation to be in charge of giant book megastores. When the new Fox Books opens close to Kathleen’s store, it doesn’t take long for the little store is forced out of business. Kathleen goes to her unknown online friend for advice and comfort – who obviously is Joe.

Ebert said, “And yet this is not quite an Idiot Plot, so called because a word from either party would instantly end the confusion.” It has the confusion only to a degree, and then does something interesting: lets Joe find out who Kathleen is while still letting her stay really in the dark. The moving irony is that Joe just let himself be insulted by the woman he loves. “You’re nothing but a suit!” she says. “That’s my cue,” he says. “Goodnight.” As he kindly hides his pain, we are comforted only by the knowledge that eventually the balance will fall from her eyes.

The movie was directed by Nora Ephron, who casted Hanks and Ryan in “Sleepless in Seattle,” and has made an emotional, if not an actual, sequel. Ebert noted, “That earlier film was partly inspired by "An Affair to Remember," and this one is inspired by "The Shop Around the Corner," but both are really inspired by the appeal of Ryan and Hanks, who have more winning smiles than most people have expressions.”

Ebert said, “Ephron and her co-writer, her sister Delia, have surrounded the characters with cultural references that we can congratulate ourselves on recognizing: not only Jane Austen, but also the love affair carried on by correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Not only "The Godfather" (which "contains the answers to all of life's questions"), but also Anthony Powell and Generalissimo Franco.” (It is one of the movie’s silently hilarious prides that the little store’s elderly bookkeeper, played by Jean Stapleton, was in love years ago with a man who couldn’t marry her “because he had to run Spain.”) Ebert mentioned, “The plot I shall not describe, because it consists of nothing but itself, so any description would make it redundant.” What you see are two people the viewers want to see together, and so many things separate them. There is an additional difficulty that both Hanks and Ryan begin the movie dating other people (Parker Posey and Greg Kinnear – respectively, obviously). The partners break up without many complaints, and then we’re left with these two lonely bachelors, who have decent jobs but no one to love, and who are stuck by fate somewhere where he is destroying her career, and she is turning to him (without knowing it is him) for comfort. Excellent!

The movie is nice enough to not make the giant store the villain. Say anything, those giant stores are fun to be in, and there is a scene where Kathleen walks unknowingly into Joe’s big store for the first time and browses around, at the magazine racks and the café and all the books – and we have an emotional moment when she eavesdrops a question in the children’s section, and she knows the answer but obviously the clerk doesn’t, so she says the answer but it makes her cry, and Joe overhears everything. Shocking!

As you might have already known, this is a movie that has to be seen. Especially since there is a Thanksgiving dinner part, so it fits well with the holiday today. If you’re a fan of Tom Hanks and/or Meg Ryan, don’t miss the chance to see this movie. You will fall in love with it, I promise you.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope everyone had a great dinner because I know I did. Stay tuned tomorrow for the next installment in “Vietnam War Movie Month.”