**½/**** Image A Sound B+ Extras B+
starring Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Greg Kinnear, Parker Posey
screenplay by Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron
directed by Nora Ephron
by Bill Chambers I'm no grammarian, but AOL's syntactical redundancy of a catchphrase "You've got mail!" has always been nails-on-a-chalkboard for me. Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail the movie is somewhat redundant, too: It bears more than a passing resemblance to the 1993 Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan-Ephron outing Sleepless in Seattle while also being the second remake of Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner, which I'm embarrassed to admit I've never seen. (Have since rectified.-Ed.)
Hanks plays Joe Fox, co-owner of and heir to Fox & Sons, a Barnes & Noble-esque chain of bookstores. His plan to open a behemoth in the heart of New York City, complete with a coffee bar and comfy couches for reading, is destined to lay waste to the independent booksellers nearby–including "The Shop Around the Corner," a children's book barn owned by Kathleen (Ryan), who happens to be Joe's anonymous online companion. The two may despise each other in real life (actually, it's a pretty one-way street on Kathleen's part), but, cloaked by e-handles, they exchange jokes, anecdotes, advice, and nuggets of wisdom (i.e., quotes from The Godfather) via AOL's popular Instant Messenger. They fall in love like this, of course, and the friction between their parallel lives is reliably entertaining. In one instance, Joe–"NY152"–naively encourages Kathleen–"Shopgirl"–to start protests against his own company.
Hanks and Ryan are delightful here, though reports of their amazing chemistry are generous, if not wildly exaggerated. This is their third movie together, and while more than one critic has labelled them "the Nineties' answer to Hepburn & Tracy," I tend to think of Ryan as better matched with Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally…, whose cachet seems to have been supplanted by the inferior Sleepless in Seattle. Perhaps I feel this way because sex entered the picture in When Harry Met Sally…, whereas Hanks and Ryan keep getting paired up in antiseptic, fairytale romances. It's hard to even imagine them together in the long term in either of their Ephron outings, since the plots of these films effectively quarantine them from each other until the climax. Their romance is more a myth created in the audience's collective head.
Another quibble: You've Got Mail's minor characters take a backseat to the stars. Kathleen's coworkers arguably exist solely to prompt her neurotic observations–she never returns their interest. Of marginally greater significance is Frank (Greg Kinnear), the Luddite with whom Kathleen has an unaffectionate relationship right out of Screwball Comedy 101. He's the Ralph Bellamy character, in other words, there to be shed. Mayhaps due to Kinnear's quicksilver timing (his ad-libbed talk-show appearance is a hoot), Frank comes off as less of a cardboard obstacle than Joe's own girlfriend, played by Parker Posey. It's easy to see a generic rich person with such a harridan, but not Hanks, whose tolerance of her strains credulity.
Still, Hanks effortlessly glides past one contrivance after another like he's doing a soft shoe; in this respect, he is Spencer Tracy, or Jimmy Stewart, or Cary Grant. He polishes to a gleam vintage Ephron observations like, "Don't you love New York in the fall? It always makes me want to buy school supplies." Ephron, who was a sophomore director the first time they worked together, knows she's driving a Cadillac in Hanks and Ryan. Her command of cinema, from the visuals (Pleasantville's John Lindley was the film's director of photography) to the music track (which employs such diverse acts as The Cranberries and Harry Nilsson to good effect), has definitely improved since Sleepless in Seattle. (It's more blatant because You've Got Mail is essentially a do-over.) I can't say she sold me on the pat, strangely conservative ending, however, in which she sells her heroine up the river in sentimental haste. Where's Kathleen's pride?
THE DVD
Warner's You've Got Mail DVD is, pardon the pun, stacked. The 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer is awfully good, with natural colours and definitive contrast. I did notice the odd white speckle from dirt on the negative, but this is more an observation than a complaint. On the audio end, the Dolby Digital 5.1 track is inexpressive save for musical interludes (and even then, not all of the musical interludes). Who cares? This is a dialogue-driven film, and Hanks, Ryan, et al. have never sounded better.
After listening to the disc's screen-specific commentary (a third track houses isolated music in 2.0) by Ephron and producer Lauren Shuler Donner (director Richard Donner's wife), I could only conclude that Donner's presence was extraneous. She mostly reiterates whatever Ephron just said, and said better. Their discussion is full of interesting minutiae, mind you, like the fact that the brown leaves during You've Got Mail's autumnal sequences are the product of digital trickery because the film was shot in summer.
Also on the DVD: a 14-minute (counting head and tail credits, plus extended clips) HBO interview with Ephron that is slick and disappointingly insubstantial; two trailers (Ryan's reaction in these previews to Joe's invitation to meet is much funnier than the one that wound up in the final cut); Reel Recommendation trailers for Arthur, the Hanks-Ryan starrer Joe Versus The Volcano, and 10 others; a tour, narrated by Ephron and Donner, through Manhattan's West Side; an appetizing The Shop Around the Corner trailer; yet another trailer (I'm so sick of typing that word!) for the Judy Garland remake of The Shop Around the Corner (In the Good Old Summertime); and, last but not least, production notes galore.
Whoops–I almost forgot: As You've Got Mail is a digital-age movie, Warners has opted to include a wealth of DVD-ROM material. I'm unable to view it, but I can tell you that PC users (Mac-heads are out of luck, which is ironic considering Kathleen's everpresent Powerbook in the movie proper) can access call sheets, a comparison between Shop… and …Summertime…, music cues, interviews, Joe and Kathleen's e-mails (which I'd love to read), a screensaver, and more. Although I'm not sure what that "more" is.
110 minutes; PG; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1; CC; English, French subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Warner
