You've Got Mail

Dir Nora Ephron

Cert PG

WHEN rom-com expert Nora Ephron sets out to be funny and touching, and gets Meg Ryan to wrinkle her little nose, and Tom Hanks to be all little-boy-lost, what can a jaded cinema hack do?

We have to swallow our cynicism and our bitterness and adopt the 'Don't fight it, feel it' motto of the open-minded. The last time these three were together the result was Sleepless in Seattle. Before that, Ephron and Ryan teamed up for When Harry met Sally... As the final credits role it's like a crack team of trained commandos have wrapped you in a big, snuggly, woolly-pully and left a stupid grin and box of tissues behind as a token gesture.

You will enjoy this film. You can't not enjoy this film. It is so clinically designed to do what it does it might well be genetically modified.

In that, it's not charmless. Yes, it's rom-com by numbers. Yes, at the end of the day it is pretty shallow and soul-less. But by the end of the movie, you really want the main protagonists to get together just to see what happens. And that is the true bench-mark of a good movie.

Here's the plot. Ryan is Kathleen Kelly, a cutesy-type who runs the small, New York children's book shop set up by her mother -- all books and wood stain. She is in a relationship, but is having what could be called a cyber-affair in which she exchanges anonymous e-mails with someone with whom she obviously clicks.

Unknown to her, that someone is Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) -- the owner of Manhatten's largest book superchain, the newest outlet of which threatens Kathleen's little shop from the moment it opens. By day the pair hate each other, but by night they set the information superhighway on fire. It's a simple enough plot, but it really works.

Hanks and Ryan do nothing that they didn't do before. Swap the radio for the internet and you get Sleepless in New York. But so what? The pair work well together on screen. There is a real chemistry and absolutely no doubt that, if the situation was real, the pair would always fall in love and always end up together.

Ephron's script has the gentle humour upon which her success is based. Ephron's world is as fragrant and fresh as Meg Ryan's character. If the couple, in the future, were to have babies they would be delivered by rabbits or baby deer. It's always spring or one of those exciting New York winters full of snow, people carrying Christmas trees and Phil Spector groups singing carols.

American film-makers are very keen on getting the feeling right for the audience as they leave the cinema and You've Got Mail does that. Watch it with someone you love and you will come out arm in arm. Those who visit the cinema alone take note. Jeremy Austin

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.