Some ideas never look as good on film as they do on paper — or, for that matter, on the computer screen. Blip. Bleep. Ploop.
Nora Ephron’s “You’ve Got Mail” is a perfect example: a contemporary New York City romantic comedy in which Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan play rival Upper West Side bookstore owners who fall in love anonymously through e-mail correspondence, while alienating each other in the flesh.
Sound like a great notion? Sure. Ephron’s movie has obvious aspirations to be as savvy and witty about modern Manhattan manners as Woody Allen’s best ’80s stuff, and as sweet and heart-grabbing as this movie’s great 1940 source, “The Shop Around the Corner” (which is the name of Ryan’s store). And, initially, you feel pretty confident it can realize those goals. Or at least part of them.
By the end, though, it hasn’t. Despite Hanks at his sturdiest and Ryan at her twinkliest, despite Parker Posey and Greg Kinnear as their lovers, despite great locations and pretty photography, the whole movie goes bland and flat as a fast-food knish or a blank computer screen. If, in “Sleepless in Seattle,” Ephron and her adorable co-superstars made a modern romance — lovers who meet through talk radio — that recaptured some of the charms of Hollywood past, here they misfire. And for a puzzling but fatal reason: “You’ve Got Mail” lacks both heart and smarts.
Superficially, the material sounds great. Ryan, radiating winsome sexiness, is Kathleen Kelly, owner of an Upper West Side landmark: a children’s bookstore that her mom started 40 years ago. Hanks is Joe Fox, her unknowing e-mail buddy and scion of a rich corporate family who run Fox Books, a chain of modern “Borders”-style super-emporiums, complete with coffee bars and capacious discount tables.
Kathleen, in a way, represents the old Upper West Side traditions: gentle, idealistic, old-fashioned liberal. Joe is the new-style neo-conservative business guy bred for an era of chain stores and media revolutions. Both Joe and Kathleen are also in failing relationships: Joe with book editor Patricia Eden (Posey) and Kathleen with newspaper columnist Frank Navasky (Kinnear). Since Fox Books is, as one sign says, “just around the corner,” they’re headed for collision. Yet, however they hate and distrust each other in real life, they adore each other on e-mail, where they unknowingly communicate every day in heartfelt bursts.
Director, co-writer and co-producer Ephron seems to have the cast and credentials — script for “When Harry Met Sally,” direction for “Sleepless” — to bring all this off. But “You’ve Got Mail” isn’t half the movie it should have been — or that director Ernst Lubitsch’s “Corner” was.
I’m prejudiced, of course.
“The Shop Around the Corner” happens to be one of my favorite movies. Set in a turn-of-the-century Budapest department store during Christmas season — with the young James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan as lovers-who-woo-by-mail, it seems to me a nearly perfect romantic comedy. Remade two other times, Lubitsch’s film is especially notable for the way it makes you recognize human fallibility, yet believe finally in human goodness and love. The core is Stewart’s role of Alfred Kralik: a convincingly kind manager who saves the shop and breaks down Sullavan’s resistance with equal patience.
What’s different today?
Well, for one thing, Kralik’s counterpart, Hanks’ Joe Fox, is a jerk. Though Hanks is by almost everyone’s estimation the modern Stewart, his role has a very different pitch, one he can’t overcome. Where Kralik is a mensch, Fox is a pragmatist and user with a mostly concealed kind heart. Where Kralik saved the store and won Sullavan’s heart, Hanks’ Joe is much more self-absorbed and pragmatic, even after he discovers she’s the e-mail mate whom he loves.
Why? Not for any reason Nora and writing partner-sister Delia Ephron make clear — unless, despite the romanticism of “Sleepless in Seattle” and “Michael,” they think that cold-hearted businessmen are sexy guys. More problems: The fact that Kathleen runs a children’s book store instead of, say, a more eclectic one, is overly sentimental. And the e-mail messages through which Joe and Kathleen fall in love are so lacking in cleverness, emotion or poetry that I was mystified about why they fell in love.
The Ephrons also have an obvious plot twist available that they barely use (maybe because it’s obvious). Joe, once he knew the truth, could start cheering Kathleen on through e-mail, advising her on how to fight the Fox chain even while, under family pressure, he maintained the battle in real life. That would have made a much more satisfying movie than this one. But instead, the Ephrons don’t show us what we want to see: Hanks saving Ryan. Hanks and Ryan share a big mutual empathy with most audiences; they can get inside our skins as we watch them. But here, their characters are so ill-defined and even unlikable, it’s as if the filmmakers expected the stars’ mutual charm to gloss everything over.
Nora and Delia’s playwright parents, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, once wrote a show called “Desk Set,” which they turned into a 1957 movie for Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. In it, Tracy played an efficiency expert who seemed bent on closing down librarian Hepburn’s research department. The Ephron sisters’ “You’ve Got Mail” is much closer in tone to their parents’ brittle “Desk Set” than it is to the supple, beguiling “The Shop Around the Corner.”
“Shop Around the Corner” was sophisticated but tenderhearted, witty but warm. That’s part of its appeal. By comparison, the humor in “You’ve Got Mail” is shallow, trendy and even a little mean: not only in the way Joe treats Kathleen (and vice versa), but the way the movie treats their mates, one of whom is ridiculed because he’s liberal and the other because she’s a careerist. In the end, “Mail,” for all its graces, struck me as a somewhat hard-hearted show that wants us to believe it’s all warm and fuzzy inside. That’s one message I didn’t get.
”YOU’VE GOT MAIL”
(star) (star)
Directed by Nora Ephron; written by N. Ephron and Delia Ephron, based on the screenplay “The Shop Around the Corner” by Samson Raphaelson, based on the play “Parfumerie” by Miklos Laszlo; photographed by John Lindley; edited by Richard Marks; production designed by Dan Davis; music by George Fenton; produced by Lauren Shuler Donner and N. Ephron. A Warner Bros. release; opens Friday. Running time: 1:56. MPAA rating: PG.
THE CAST
Joe Fox …………….. Tom Hanks
Kathleen Kelly ………. Meg Ryan
Patricia Eden ……….. Parker Posey
Birdie ……………… Jean Stapleton
Frank Navasky ……….. Greg Kinnear
George Pappas ……….. Steve Zahn
