the enviable adulthood of you've got mail (1998)

and an exercise/surprise

I don’t remember how old I was the first time I experienced You’ve Got Mail, because in my mind I was the youngest guest at the 1998 premiere, but I do know I was a fresh 33 on my most recent rewatch last week. What I realized sometime between my 53rd and 67th rewatch is that one of the main reasons I love this film, why it feels like such a comfort to me, why I’ll keep coming back to it again and again, is that it is a movie of, for, and by adults.

Clara, aren’t all non-children’s films made of, for, and by adults? Well, you’d think so, wouldn’t you! But no. I’m talking grown-ups. I’m talking normal people¹ who go to work and attend dinner parties and take walks in the park and do a weekly grocery shop and have clean homes and enjoy stable friendships. People who look and act their big age. Who live in a society and not their own little world.

Never not thinking about the warmth of the light in Kathleen Kelly’s home. (Photo: Warner Bros.)

I’ve been gravitating toward these films again recently, in part because rewatches and warmly-lit interiors bring me inner peace … but mostly because, at a time of rampant arrested development among folks in my age group and beyond, they show what to me is the Platonic ideal of adulthood.

Let me explain.

As a teenager, I liked You’ve Got Mail because it depicted the life I assumed I’d eventually have. As an adult, I love it because it shows me the kind of existence—and the kinds of relationships and conversations and professions and homes and interests and hobbies— I should aim for. Because let’s be honest, these films are essentially a comedy of manners for the modern age. It’s people talking and going to each other’s houses and engaging in petty (but never cruel) gossip.

Not to make this a full circle moment, but it’s no wonder that You’ve Got Mail features Pride and Prejudice so prominently.² Jane Austen is, when you think about it, the unspoken patron saint of the Ephron cinematic universe.

The thing is every time I see the referenced scene in The Godfather I think of You’ve Got Mail. The power that that has … (Ultimately yes I took a photo of my laptop screen with my phone. Famously, I’m all about spontaneity and imperfection.)

There’s something unreal but allllmost tangible about the interpersonal relationships in films like You’ve Got Mail—it’s the politeness, the frankness, the no-hard-feelings of it all. Give or take a couple emotional affairs, everyone more or less acts—if not at once, then eventually—as someone in their circumstances ought, and it’s on the strength of Ephron’s (and Meyers’s … and Curtis’s) skill as a writer and a director that instead of this behavior making the characters and the stories boring or staid or overly predictable or worse, moralistic, it mostly renders them entertainingly human. This should be an impossible balance to strike, mind you! And yet there I am, once a quarter, clocking in to the Kathleen Kelly-Joe Fox conflict resolution factory.

There’s a real do not let your current and utterly unobjectionable romantic partner keep you from finding the love of your life energy to Ephron’s writing that I find deeply inspiring.