You’ve Got Mail

I am very secretly a sap for romantic comedies. You’ve Got Mail is one of the best romcoms ever, and I didn’t even know this until we watched it a few weeks ago. You might say that I’m in love with this movie. Where have you been all my life? I’ve been looking for a movie just like you!

Tom Hanks plays Joe Fox, a ruthless bookstore mogul who enjoys “taking out the competition.” However, when Joe builds a mega-sized bookstore in New York he steals business from the friendly neighborhood bookstore owned by Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan).

Kathleen’s shop might have a quaint title (The Shop Around the Corner), but it’s easy to fall in love with the store for having a friendly environment and a local feel. Indeed, many people in the neighborhood are nostalgic for Kathleen’s store because it’s where they first developed a love of reading. And the people who work at the Shop love their jobs, as the Shop provides respite from the otherwise alienating nature of New York City. As an audience, we come to see why Joe Fox is the bad guy, destroying a beautiful part of the New York eco-system.

For Kathleen, her attachment to the Shop is even more personal: she inherited the Shop from her deceased mother. Kathleen is very good at running the bookstore, not necessarily in a financial sense, but in the sense that she provides a valuable service to her customers. It can be overwhelming to enter an enormous and uncurated selection of books (I’m looking at you Powell’s Book City), and Kathleen has a knack for finding really good books and connecting them with her customers. Ironically, Kathleen admits at the beginning of the movie that she has questioned why she ended up selling books; after all, she just stumbled into the business because it’s what her mother did. Kathleen wonders if her choice to continue running the bookstore was cowardly, as she never stepped outside her box. As an audience we can see that Kathleen is very good at what she does because she brings a lot of passion to the job; but one wonders whether she could have brought that passion to other jobs as well. Kathleen’s ruminations on the matter of vocations, careers, courage and purpose are much deeper than one would expect from a simple romcom.

Suffice it to say, Kathleen decides to fight Joe Fox to keep the Shop open. A not-so-friendly trade war ensues. So far in this review, I’ve painted Joe Fox as being a villain, but that’s far from clear. First of all, Joe is played by Tom Hanks, and it’s impossible to really truly hate Tom Hanks. Second, Joe clearly states his purpose up front: he wants to sell people cheap books. While I might never love Joe Fox for selling me a cheap book, I can respect that as an important function in society, and that’s all that Joe is looking for. As Joe repeats several times throughout the movie “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business”, which is a perfect encapsulation of his persona as a businessman (it turns out that Joe is a big fan of The Godfather, by the way).

Okay, so now for the twist in the story: Joe and Kathleen have been communicating anonymously via email this whole time, and have secretly fallen in love with each other! My god, this is brilliant! While Joe and Kathleen can’t stand each other in real life because of their business dispute, the intimate (albeit anonymous) nature of their Internet communications allows them to get to know each other on a personal level. We learn about Kathleen’s rumination about her career this way; we learn that Joe Fox is secretly a family man, once you get past his rough exterior.

I’m not sure that I can express how much I enjoyed this movie. It ran long for a romcom (1 hr 59 min), but even so I was sad when the end came. I fell in love with Joe and Kathleen over that short period of time and I wanted to get to know them more. My heart says that this film might be a 10. As always, it wasn’t a perfect movie: the use of outdated email systems in the movie is charming but a little wonky. Additionally, Joe and Kathleen have significant others at the beginning of the movie who they cheat on throughout the film; while it didn’t make me like the film any less, it was rather disquieting that their cheating behavior seemed so natural for Joe and Kathleen. These flaws aside, at the end of the day there are only so many movies that can steal your heart like You’ve Got Mail. As I said, I want to give this movie a 10, but I’ve only seen it once. I’m giving this movie a provisional 9, and maybe it will get bumped up to a 10/10 at some point.