You’ve Got Mail **** (1998, Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Greg Kinnear, Parker Posey, Jean Stapleton) – Classic Movie Review 883

Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan re-team with director Nora Ephron for a bid to top Sleepless in Seattle (1993) with a modernised remake of the James Stewart-Margaret Sullavan classic The Shop around the Corner (1940). Nora Ephron and Delia Ephron’s new screenplay is based on the old play Parfumerie by Miklos Lazslo.

This time Kathleen Kelly (Ryan) is the owner of a small, thriving bookshop in New York (called The Shop around the Corner!) who meets Joe Fox (Hanks) anonymously on the Internet and they accidentally fall in love. But Joe turns out to be her natural business enemy as the owner of New York’s largest book super-chain, and he builds a discount superstore just around the corner from hers, putting her out of business. Then they arrange to meet….

This good-natured and sunny, but patchy and overlong, romantic comedy is set in the then newish age of the e-mail, with a good use of the Internet in the first half. The genial Hanks looks a tiny bit old, tubby and weighty in the other sense for this kind of trivial thing now that he is a serious double-Oscar-winning actor, but the post-feminist-kookie Ryan is working at about her peak. Hanks just seems a little less engaged and less winning than in Sleepless in Seattle.

Greg Kinnear (as Frank Navasky) has some of the best lines as her nice but self-obsessed columnist boyfriend, Parker Posey (as Patricia Eden) is saddled with an unsympathetic stinker of a part as Hanks’s publisher girlfriend and Jean Stapleton has a couple of amusing moments as the shop’s old retainer.

Many of the funny bits are funny, but the soppy bits (including the ending) are sickly sweet and as hollow as a rotten tooth. Even this wish-fulfilment romantic fantasy kind of film has to persuade you, and you come away thinking this would never, ever happen.

While ending up not nearly as polished or entertaining as  Sleepless in Seattle, nevertheless, this is still an appealing slice of escapism overall.

Also in the cast are Steve Zahn, Heather Burns, David Chapelle, Dabney Coleman, John Randolph, Deborah Rush, Hallee Hirsh, Jeffrey Scarperrotta, Cara Seymour, Katie Finneran, Michael Badalucco, Veanne Cox, Bruce Jay Friedman, Sara Ramirez and Howard Spiegel.

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© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Film Review 883 derekwinnert.com