December 17–24, 1998

movie shorts

You've Got Mail

Directed by Nora Ephron
A Warner Bros. release

by Cindy Fuchs

You know that warm feeling that you get when you're in a Borders bookstore? The way you're moved by the rhythmic ca-ching of the cash registers, the precise design of the latte cups, the lovely, mass-produced merchandise displays? The sense of cuddly security inspired by the chain's homogeneity, anonymity and predictability? The perfection of the megastore makes you feel cozy and confident, even vaguely blessed by the annual deluge known as The Holidays.

Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail wants you to believe, to feel good about this kind of overwhelming commercialism (despite the film's opening, which sets up an opposition between good, small bookshops and big, bad chainstores), and it dresses up its contradictions in consumer joy. Seasonal to the max, You've Got Mail is a paradigm of product placement, packaged good cheer and innocuous irony. All the elements here are designed to produce box office magic, from the re-teaming of Sleepless in Seattle's Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan to the surefire plot, based on Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner. Nora and Delia Ephron's update on the 1940 romantic comedy is that the lovers-to-be hook up by e-mail, as opposed to writing to post office boxes, like James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan.

As in the original film (based on Miklos Laszlo's play, Parfumerie), the protagonists meet in person and dislike one another, while at the same time they are falling in love via their anonymous correspondence. The situation is painfully cute, but it speaks to a range of immediate concerns, including some pertinent to the contemporary mediascape, like fidelity, trust and lying to loved ones.

Consider that the lovers-to-be, chainstore tycoon Joe Fox (Hanks) and small bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly (Ryan), are introduced as well-meaning cheaters. The liaison is chaste (no sex, cyber or otherwise), but they're clearly getting off on their daily exchanges. In alternating scenes (much like those showing Ryan and Hanks in Baltimore and Seattle in Sleepless), they perform parallel rituals. They wait for their respective partners (Parker Posey as his snooty editor girlfriend, Greg Kinnear as her self-absorbed journalist boyfriend) to leave their respective apartments, then gleefully log on.

Apparently living for the moments when they've "got mail," the chirpy pair spend a lot of time in front of their laptop screens. Aided by their adorable voice-overs, you see them from various angles, typing, smiling, fretting, and, in Kathleen's case, crinkling her nose oh-so-delightfully. Because Joe and Kathleen are so plainly movie-made for each other (and because they're played by Hanks and Ryan), their initial betrayals are deemed inoffensive.

Online, Joe offers witty commentaries on daily, business-related inanities (say, the too-many choices at Starbucks). In person, he's thoroughly affable, amusing with his young relatives and charming with the shy Kathleen (she feels unable to "express" herself in the flesh; this is the lesson she learns, to say what she thinks out loud). Because Joe's so very nice, the fact that he also happens to eat small bookstores for breakfast is less a character flaw than a plot contrivance, something Kathleen (and you) will just have to get over, in order to make the romance work. Apparently, the hype is true: Joe just wants to provide his customers with discount prices and large inventories. Though she would seem to be Joe's moral antithesis, Kathleen (whose teeny children's bookstore happens to be around the Upper West Side corner from the latest Fox Gigantor Store) really only needs some lessons in good business sense. She needs to grow up.

All soft hues and childish charms, Kathleen drinks cappuccinos, wears beige sweaters, fills her shop windows with handmade decorations and tries valiantly but without malice to fight the mercenary meanies. Her shop has a neighborhood history (it was owned by her saintly mother, seen in unbearably schmaltzy flashbacks where she dances with little-girl Kathleen) and darling staff people (including Jean Stapleton and Steve Zahn), a loyal clientele and regularly featured writers. These nostalgic qualities make the shop by-definition worth preserving. It's cluttered with kiddie paraphernalia, Little Engine That Could stand-ups and Eloise posters, timeless and precious reminders of a presumably collective past.

The gigastore, on the other hand, is introduced under construction, filled with plaster dust and plastic sheeting. Joe roams the huge space with his store manager Kevin (Dave Chappelle, refurbishing Joseph Schildkraut's Shop Around the Corner role so that the character is the only black guy in sight—in New York!—and the closest thing to a best friend that work-obsessed Joe might imagine). Once built, the big store quickly crushes its competition: All that's left is for the romance to kick in.

Frankly, that takes much longer than necessary: The only semblance of a surprise is the film's moral redemption of chain stores. But that's not so surprising as it might seem at first. According to this feel-good studio movie, corporations are as benevolent as their CEOs. Private Ryan's savior could never pass as Corporate Satan, which means that You've Got Mail has to be ethically squishy. Joe comes to terms with his own shark-ness when he dumps the snappish girlfriend and confronts his father (Dabney Coleman) on his history of infidelities and moral failures.

So Joe learns his lessons, thus deserving the perfect fairy princess, who happens to be in need of a job. And yet, there's something uncomfortable about the fact that (and this plot point is taken from The Shop Around the Corner) the male character learns the woman's identity before she learns his. So, Joe manipulates the relationship (and Kathleen) to fit his timetable and interests. It might look as if such retro-gender arrangements make the movie less modern than the e-mail angle suggests, but this is user-friendly electronic existence: there's no mention of the privacy or class issues potentially unsettling Internet-utopia.

And, really, the film's neat blending of nostalgia and computer culture makes sense. Kathleen is your point of entry, and with her you learn to appreciate Progress. Because Joe embodies his store, it has to be honorable, as idea and practice. After all, it's individuals and their intentions that count, not underlying economic structures or cultural fallouts. Believe it: You can love Big Business.