#248: You’ve Got Mail

Release Date: December 18th, 1998

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Written by: Delia Ephron and Nora Ephron

Directed by: Nora Ephron

3.5 Stars

Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail is aging in unexpected and interesting ways. I’m sure if I would have seen it back during its initial theatrical release in the winter of 1998, I would have found it a bit saccharine and a smidge too whimsical. Ephron is going for cute here, and she succeeds, but she’s kind of relying on that cuteness to carry the movie. Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are great, don’t get me wrong, but if cute doesn’t do it for you, You’ve Got Mail isn’t going to work.

But now, a quarter century later, in a world under threat from AI and fascism and mega-corporate mergers, You’ve Got Mail has become a sort of gentle artifact of a time past. 

What I was struck by the most while watching the film tonight was just how innocent mainstream Americans were in those last few years of the millennium. Not that Ephron was attempting a completely realistic depiction of the country - like most ‘90s Hollywood movies, there’s an overall lack of diversity and everybody’s apartments are a bit too big - but she did capture, unintentionally probably, the blissful ignorance of American culture at that time.  

You’ve Got Mail is clearly a pre-9/11 movie. It’s also clearly a pro-corporate movie. Ephron warmly uses Starbucks, Apple, and AOL branding to show her Gen X characters existing in a metropolitan utopia. Shoot, even when Tom Hanks’ character Joe, who runs a large bookstore chain, puts Meg Ryan’s character Kathleen’s small children’s bookstore out of business, the overall mood seems to be, “‘Yeah, that’s sad, but the big chain is better.”

So in the world of Nora Ephron’s You’ve Got Mail, a brick and mortar bookstore is an inevitable part of the future and tech companies are good for society.

What a simple time. It makes an interesting backdrop for what is otherwise a pleasantly cute, better than average romantic comedy.