You've Got Mail movie review & film summary (1998)
The movie was directed by Nora Ephron, who also paired Hanks and Ryan in "Sleepless in Seattle" (1993), and has made an emotional, if not a literal, sequel. That earlier film was partly inspired by "An Affair to Remember," and this one is inspired by "The Shop Around the Corner," but both are really inspired by the appeal of Ryan and Hanks, who have more winning smiles than most people have expressions.
Ephron and her co-writer, her sister Delia, have surrounded the characters with cultural references that we can congratulate ourselves on recognizing: not only Jane Austen, but also the love affair carried on by correspondence between George Bernard Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell. Not only "The Godfather" (which "contains the answers to all of life's questions"), but also Anthony Powell and Generalissimo Franco. (It is one of the movie's quietly hilarious conceits that the little store's elderly bookkeeper, played by Jean Stapleton, was in love years ago with a man who couldn't marry her "because he had to run Spain.") The plot I shall not describe, because it consists of nothing but itself, so any description would make it redundant. What you have are two people the audience desires to see together, and a lot of devices to keep them apart. There is the added complication that both Hanks and Ryan begin the movie with other partners (Parker Posey and Greg Kinnear--respectively, of course). The partners get dumped without much fuss, and then we're left with these two lonely single people, who have neat jobs but no one to rub toes with, and who are trapped by fate in a situation where he is destroying her dream, and she is turning to him (without knowing it is him) for consolation. Perfect.
The movie is sophisticated enough not to make the megastore into the villain. Say what you will, those giant stores are fun to spend time in, and there is a scene where Kathleen ventures anonymously into Joe's big store for the first time and looks around, at the magazine racks and the cafe and all the books--and then there's the heartbreaking moment when she overhears a question in the children's section, and she knows the answer but of course the clerk doesn't, and so she supplies the answer but it makes her cry, and Joe overhears everything. Whoa.
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