YOU'VE GOT MAIL Reviewed by Luke Buckmaster
Cast: Tom Hanks, Meg Ryan, Greg Kinnear, David Chappelle, Dabney Coleman, Parker Posey, Jean Stapleton, Steve Zahn Director: Nora Ephron Screenplay: Nora Ephron & Delia Ephron
Australian theatrical release: December 26, 1998
On the Buckmaster scale of 0 stars (bomb), to 5 stars (a masterpiece): 2 stars
At this point in time, no director has been able to make standard computer screens look interesting in a movie. I'm not talking about spooky virtual reality (Disclosure) or warped cyber space (Hackers); I mean actual, I-got-it-at-Dick-Smith screens. You may remember when Whoopi Goldberg energetically conversed on an ancient computer in Jumping Jack Flash, or when Tom Cruise battered away on a laptop for a brief period in Mission: Impossible. There is just nothing interesting about watching somebody read text off a screen, just so they can say it out loud to save the audience from reading it themselves.
What is interesting is the prospect of finding love on the Internet. There is a number of intriguing ideas which could have been developed in You've Got Mail - having a chat room as a metaphor of society, examining the net as a means to escape modern life, or how the online world is just as vulnerable as the real world. But director Nora Ephron's (Sleepless in Seattle) only intention is to keep the film smaltzy and simplistic. She avoids any opportunity to study the medium in which the film's protagonists use to communicate; instead, she studies the protagonists themselves. Ordinarily that would be fine, but Tom Hank's character is boring, ditto for Meg Ryan's.
Two Internet geeks converse over email and chat rooms, and eventually discover that they are in love with each other. But these are not geeks who wear thick rimmed glasses and are twenty pounds overweight - they are in the cute form of Joe Fox (Hanks) and Kathleen Kelly (Ryan). Fox owns Manhattan's largest book chain, and when he opens a new superstore it threatens to destroy Kelly's small bookstore "The Shop Around the Corner." In "real life," these two are sworn enemies, but over the Internet - unaware of who they are conversing with - they share intimate details of their lives.
So what we have is a film with uninteresting central characters, no opportunities to explore their obsessive usage of email, and a film as meaningful as a Pamela Anderson home movie. If not for a few strong (but repressed) performances and some occasional touching moments, You've Got Mail could have easily infected the holiday season with the Very Bad Filmmaking virus. Although, it must be said that some viewers will have no problem enjoying the central romance (judging from the squealing girls sitting in front of me, I'd say it would be most enjoyed by females aged 12-18), and for most, You've Got Mail will be hard to hate. For me, it was hard to like.
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