You’ve Got Mail

Directed by Nora Ephron, You’ve Got Mail follows business rivals Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) and Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) as they inadvertently start flirting with one another via an online messaging service. It’s an appealing premise that’s employed to predominantly compelling effect by Ephron, as the filmmaker, working from a script written with Delia Ephron, does a superb job of establishing the predictably affable protagonists and the idealized, perpetually upbeat landscape in which they exist – with the movie’s agreeable vibe heightened by the stellar and completely charismatic efforts of its two well-matched stars. (And it doesn’t hurt, either, that the picture boasts and benefits from the scene-stealing efforts of such top-notch periphery players as Steve Zahn, Dabney Coleman, and Parker Posey.) And although the film contains its fair share of engaging, entertaining story threads and digressions, You’ve Got Mail, saddled with an almost aggressively overlong running time, admittedly does progress into a third act that’s perhaps not quite as strong as one might’ve preferred – with the less-than-superb vibe compounded by a needless reliance on bottom-of-the-barrel plot devices (including the dreaded fake breakup). Such concerns are rendered moot once the uplifting and entirely satisfying conclusion rolls around, however, with the end result a compulsively entertaining romcom that ultimately does fare better than Hanks and Ryan’s initial cinematic pairing, Sleepless in Seattle.

*** out of ****