‘You’ve Got Mail’ was the last great New York Rom-Com

Twenty-five years ago next week and two years before it would merge with AOL, Warner Brothers released “You’ve Got Mail.” Starring Meg Ryan, Tom Hanks and the Upper West Side, the film grossed over $250 million. And if you’re the kind of woman who gravitates toward Jane Austen, finely woven cardigans, flowers at the farmers’ markets, impeccable grammar, the ’90s, book-filled antebellum apartments, and the primacy of small, independent businesses, then your relationship with the film can be ritualistic – even devotional.

For me, it’s been that way since the beginning, long before I could stream it on a whim.

When I try to think of a better romantic comedy that has been made since, where New York is so central to the story – a comedy that is bigger, more literate, more iconic or more in tune with the lives of a certain class of people who live here – I can’t think of any. Based on “The Shop Around the Corner,” Ernst Lubitsch’s 1940 love story set in Budapest, “You’ve Got Mail” features two people anonymously falling for each other online in the backward era of dial-up. In 1998, their way of communicating was modern, but their connection, based on words, on clever turns of phrase, on funny observations about the world around them, was clearly pre-tech, bound to the tropes of classic romantic comedies of the ‘Years’ 30. Whatever would happen a decade and a half later – the cunning packaging required for anyone venturing onto Bumble or Tinder – content, in the truest expression of the word, would always be the only currency that mattered, the self above everything. self-presentation.

The world of “You’ve Got Mail” is characterized by a highly refined provincialism that has always and forever characterized much of New York life. Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) and Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) never seem to go below Broadway and 72nd Street or above Riverside and 111th. They are meant for each other in part because neither of them would really see the value in bothering.

Despite the intimacy of this geography, the two email back and forth for much of the film without knowing essential biographical details about each other. Kathleen is the second generation owner of a beloved children’s bookstore called Shop Around the Corner. Joe—who will eventually put her out of business—is the dynastic overseer of a chain like Barnes & Noble, which in the late 1990s became a receptacle for much of the antipathy New Yorkers felt toward a city on the cusp of great transformation. . As Kathleen puts it when her store finally closes: “It’s going to be something depressing. Like a baby gap.”