You've Got Mail

You've Got Mail (1998) is about two people writing to each other online who know each other in real life without realising it. Kathleen runs a small children's bookshop she inherited from her mother. Joe opens an enormous book chain on the same street and pushes her toward closing. Face to face they are enemies. At the same time they are writing under pseudonyms and telling each other things they have told nobody. Joe finds out first and says nothing. The second half is what he does with that knowledge. The story is not new. It is a remake of The Shop Around the Corner from 1940, where the two letter writers worked in the same shop. Nora Ephron turned the letters into email. The film preserves the internet of its moment like an archive: the dial up handshake, the AOL greeting, the mail notification. Watching it now, those details register more than the story. There is an unintended irony too. In the film the chain kills the small shop and this is presented as inevitable progress. A few years later, selling books online did the same thing to that chain. It is the third film Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan made together. It runs 119 minutes. Good for: romantic comedy, the nineties, and New York. Less good for: the man's behaviour is uncomfortable seen from here, and the pace is slow.