It’s ironic, but while some movies suffer through the passage of time, others grow more endearing.
Romantic comedies often weather nicely through the years because fans want to latch on to something familiar as they endure the ups and downs of a roller coaster courtship. What kills it are the cliches; see also, “She’s All That,” Freddie Prinze, Jr. If your relationship dates back 20 years, you and your significant friend are likely to relish the nuances sprinkled throughout a movie old enough to legally consume alcohol. This now means you’re laughing as your relate to the lead role’s hairstyle or choice in clothes about as often as the one liners.
Such is the case with Nora Ephron’s 1998 romcom “You’ve Got Mail,” starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks. Now, for all the same nostalgic reasons that cause movies to never be re-released onto Netflix, there are a few relevant threads that network across Ephron’s technological reboot of the 1940 film “The Shop Around the Corner” that keeps things fresh while viewing it through the lens of 2018.
The doe-eyed Ryan was, and may still be, the benchmark by which all romcom maidens are measured. She solidified her place in this genre during the ‘90s through roles in “Joe Versus the Volcano,” “French Kiss” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” The savvy movie fan already picked up on a particular formula through that filmography, but let’s go back and adopt 1989’s classic “When Harry Met Sally” to this argument. For the better part of a decade, Ryan had us falling in love with her scrunched-up button of a nose and her starry-eyed stare.
“You’ve Got Mail” revolves around the developing romance between bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly (Ryan) and megastore owner Joe Fox (Hanks) as the two secretly converse through email behind each other’s significant others played by Greg Kinnear and Parker Posey. The hijinx continues to thicken as the two grow closer to one another, despite not knowing who the other one is in real life. The audience, however, knows full well that Kelly’s quaint corner store book shop is in danger of going out of business because of Fox’s megastore opening across the street. The tension builds because as an apparent romance blossoms, a seething hatred ensues in real life.
The movie’s harshest critics had several reasons as to why they were not sold on the film. Washington Post’s Michael O’Sullivan dialed in to perhaps the loudest product placement for America Online’s newest version of its online interface, AOL 4.0. “As I staggered zombie-like out of a screening of ‘You’ve Got Mail,’ an insistent voice kept sounding in my head: Must . . . enroll . . . in America Online . . . now,” mused O’Sullivan, in the lede to his December 1998 review.
Critics also dissed the movie for it resembling another Ryan-Hanks film from just 
five years before. Switch out the names, the professions, the medium in which the two are drawn together, and you have yourself “Sleepless in Seattle.” Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that Ephron wrote the screenplay to that one, too. And, because everyone loves Meg Ryan, let us gloss over the fact that you’re unlikely to remember her characters’ names in these films. That may be because she often brings with each character the same social quirks and mannerisms that blend Sally, Annie and Kathleen together into one person. At the time, the comparisons were inevitable and the product placement for America Online, Starbucks Coffee, IBM and Apple were sure to grate on people’s patience. However, time upgrades the entertainment value of this movie, and it’s nearly as dramatic as the transition from dial-up to broadband.
“You’ve Got Mail” serves as somewhat of a documentary on human nature prior to the mass proliferation of smartphones and social media. The contrast between the times is so vast, hearing Heather Burns ask Steve Zahn whether or not he is “online” elicits an unintended chuckle before he serves his punchline. And, let’s talk about the emails. Both Ryan’s Kelly and Hanks’ Fox write to each other like 19th century playwrights, long and verbose with perfect grammar, devoid of emoticons, “LOLs” or scandalous pictures. America Online famously rebranded itself to AOL as a means to fit into the abbreviated lexicon of a younger audience. It was within its chat rooms where people first learned to use brb, lol and l8r. Personally, that’s a shame, because if it wasn’t for our love affair with acronyms and economically-syllabic words, perhaps Janet Maslin’s attempt to thrust “cyberflirtation” into our lexicon would have survived past her New York Times review.
Nonetheless, the kind of romance that initially seemed forced through one-minute shy of a two-hour commercial for American Online is now more likely in a society that doesn’t know or can’t remember a time without an internet connection.
