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Nora Ephron tangles with the Web in Mail

by Peter Keough

YOU'VE GOT MAIL. Directed by Nora Ephron. Written by Nora and Delia Ephron. With Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, Parker Posey, Jean Stapleton, Greg Kinnear, Dave Chappelle, and Steve Zahn. A Warner Bros. Films release. At the Harbour Mall, Showcase, Starcase, Tri-Boro, Westerly, and Woonsocket cinemas.

The romantic comedy will never die, because there will always be irreconcilable differences and the need to resolve them, if only in a tepid fantasy. The gulfs between classes, sensibilities, and sexes may gape in this society, but as Ernst Lubitsch pointed out in his consummate The Shop Around the Corner, nowhere do these differences become more apparent than between people who are most alike. In You've Got Mail, Nora Ephron's glib but charming remake of Lubitsch's classic, the differences between the befuddled lovers are greater than in the original, and the similarities to her previous hits When Harry Met Sally (which she scripted) and Sleepless in Seattle (which she wrote and directed) are apparent. The remake doesn't touch the depth, warmth, and subtlety of the original, but it does surpass in wit and maturity the smug sentimentality and snooty humor of Ephron's previous efforts.

Give some of the credit to stars Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, recycled from Seattle and once again playing potential lovers crossed by the high-tech media designed to draw them closer together. The radio talk shows of the earlier film give way in Mail to the Internet, as Hanks's Joe Fox and Ryan's Kathleen Kelly bare their souls anonymously to each other in an on-line chat room. Outside of cyber-reality, though, they know each other only as bitter enemies. Joe is the manager of a corporate bookstore chain putting little independent venues out of business; Kathleen owns one such establishment, which is coyly named "The Little Shop Around the Corner," an Upper West Side children's-book nook founded by her mother.

It's corporate versus entrepreneurial capitalism. Ryan's spunky, elfin, if self-righteous Kathleen and her mom-and-daughter throwback to a simpler economic time is the sentimental favorite -- yet Hanks's sly-but-vulnerable Joe wins points with his anarchic aplomb (sainted in recent films, Hanks gets to draw a little on the bile untapped since his roles in the flops Nothing in Common and Punchline). The moral, of course, is that -- as the subconscious of the Internet reveals -- underneath their self-righteous trappings they're the same. Kathleen may take to the streets and the airwaves to declaim about the sanctity of customer service, tradition, and the sanctity of literature, and Joe may argue that mass marketing makes literature more accessible to everyone, but beneath the justifications both are simply out to make a buck. Their romance is a sure thing.

Some obstacles stand in the way, however. Both are involved with other partners who embody the most extreme aspects of their characters. Kathleen's boyfriend, Frank Navasky (a superior Greg Kinnear), is a Luddite op-ed correspondent for the New York Observer; he orchestrates the public outcry against Joe but does little to inspire Kathleen otherwise. Joe, meanwhile, has a more than ambivalent relationship with Patricia Eden (Parker Posey again doing a parody of herself), a big-deal book editor and ruthless shrew who puts a life-changing crisis into perspective by screaming about her missing Tic-Tacs.

The other obstacles emerge from Ephron's convoluted plotting. In one funny but self-revealing scene Joe tortures himself trying to come up with a plausible explanation for standing Kathleen up on their first face-to-face date. Ephron, too, has trouble with the mechanics of revelation, of how her lovelorn heroes can shed the masks of fate and social determination and bravely acknowledge their true nature and their love for each other. The result is a clumsy copout to male prerogative and a series of anticlimaxes in lieu of a genuine resolution.

Structural elegance is not the hallmark of Mail; neither is depth of insight into the nature of role playing, love, and identity. The film makes up somewhat for those shortcomings with its delightful performances (no one can make pondering a keyboard more exhilarating than Hanks, and Ryan manages to beguile even at her most sleepy-eyed, pajama-clad obvious) and its inspired, throwaway marginalia.

True, the macho Godfather references are a bit stale after the gender movie-coding bruited in Harry and Sleepless, but there's a certain genius in giving Joe an aunt and a brother who are two cute but not insufferable children ("We are an American family," Joe explains). And by comparison with Sleepless's ultimately maudlin rehash of the already mediocre weeper An Affair To Remember, the blithe sophistication of You've Got Mail suggests that that most enduring and elusive of Hollywood genres, the romantic comedy, may be due for a comeback. One look at Lubitsch's limpid, aching original, however, makes it clear we're still a long way from being returned to sender.