YOU'VE GOT MAIL (1998)
A Film Review
Copyright Dragan Antulov 2004
In 1990s Hollywood took rather ambiguous view of rapidly
developing information technology. While filmmakers
wholeheartedly adopted CGI as compensation for their own creative
shortcomings, PCs, virtual reality and Internet in Hollywood movies
were portrayed as something sinister and inhuman. Most of those
films belonged to horror and thriller genres. One of the first to use
Internet as a plot device in romantic comedy was YOU'VE GOT
MAIL, directed in 1998 by Nora Ephron.
The script by Nora Ephron and her sister Delia is partially inspired
by 1940 classic Hollywood comedy A SHOP AROUND THE
CORNER. The plot is set in modern day New York where increasing
number of people are using Internet to enhance their social life in
chat rooms. One of them is Kathleen Kelly (played by Meg Ryan),
owner of small children's bookstore that she had inherited from her
parents, now engaged in heroic struggle to keep it as some kind of
local landmark. Joe Fox III (played by Tom Hanks) has just taken
over Fox Books, major publishing chain that tries to establish total
market domination by buying all major bookstores in New York. In
real life, Joe and Kathleen are bitter business rivals. But on the
Internet they use pseudonyms "NY152" and "Shopgirl", become best
friends and their relationship later evolves into something more.
They even begin to give each other advice how to beat their real-life
rivals, blissfully unaware of each other's identities.
YOU'VE GOT MAIL was supposed to be truly great romantic
comedy. Use of new Internet technology was one of more inventive
"high concepts". Two main stars - Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan - have
already shown great mutual chemistry in previous films, one of them
being directed by Nora Ephron. But many of those who endured two
hours of YOU'VE GOT MAIL had their high expectations quashed in
the end. Ephron tried too hard to play safe - the script was injected
with unbearable quantities of sappiness and cheap sentimentality
while humour was purged of any subversive elements.
Sterility of film's humour is matched with absence of drama. Ephron
tries to spice the plot by having one of on-line lovers discovering the
secret long before the end of film. This was the fatal flaw of YOU'VE
GOT MAIL. The audience roots for Joe and Kelly to finally open their
eyes and get together; the obstacles thrown in their path are those
that make at least one of lovers utterly dislikeable and unworthy of
such happy conclusion. Not even the great talents of Hanks and Ryan
can wash away the bitter taste of betrayal and manipulation. To make
things worse, Ephron uses snail-like place making some completely
unnecessary and formulaic characters - like Joe's and Kathleen's
"significant others" - too obvious and thus annoying to the audience.
YOU'VE GOT MAIL shows that Hollywood's fairytale treatment of
Internet can produce films as bad as those fuelled by technophobia.
RATING: 2/10 (-)
Review written on October 7th 2004
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax
http://film.purger.com - Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom/Movie Reviews in
Croatian
http://www.ofcs.org - Online Film Critics Society
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