YOU'VE GOT MAIL (31)

Directed by: Nora Ephron

Starring: Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks, Greg Kinnear, Parker Posey

The Pitch: A New York bookstore owner doesn't know the soulmate she exchanges e-mails with is in fact the corporate shark whose chain-store she despises.

Theo Sez: Would this be any easier to take without the shadow of THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER hanging over it? Maybe, but not much. It can't even manage the most basic element in this kind of romantic comedy, viz. that its two protagonists must (initially) dislike each other, offering only an empty tease whereby they say they dislike each other but obviously don't (because we all know how it's going to turn out, so why bother playing it straight?) : spotting her at a party Hanks scuttles away guiltily, as though afraid of betraying his true feelings ; after he's helped her out at a supermarket counter she looks at him longingly, with a goggle-eyed, what-a-guy expression. That supermarket scene is but one of several misguided bits - Hanks as the wacky Dad horsing around with his kids is another - softening his corporate big-shot character, as if to reassure us of his white-knight credentials : he's a lot less complicated than James Stewart's introverted, self-sacrificing romantic in the original, and it's a sad comment on 60 years of feminism that gender roles are actually a lot more primitive here - Margaret Sullavan was an imaginative firebrand stifled by routine but Ryan is just winsome and helpless, right from our opening glimpse of her tootling around in her jammies, looking like a 6-year-old on Sunday morning. Basically an inoffensive two-hour blank, padded out with random distractions : a civilised, vaguely sophisticated ambience - a bit of book-talk, a plug for the literary life, characters who say things like "Quelle nightmare!" and describe a couch as an "exquisitely uncomfortable mohair episode" ; references to Jane Austen and Joni Mitchell ; a timid, rather pathetic attempt to evoke life in the Age of the Internet ; lots of basic-issue romanticism - New York in the fall, a butterfly in the subway, "Over the Rainbow" plastered over the ending like a bad rash. "So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book," muses our heroine ; "Shouldn't it be the other way round?". Bit deep for me, I'm afraid.