‘Keeps me optimistic’: why You’ve Got Mail is my feelgood movie

The next entry in our series of writers highlighting their go-to comfort picks is an ode to Nora Ephron’s winsome romantic comedy

There’s a montage in the opening of You’ve Got Mail that is so sentimentally sweet that it feels like the cinematic equivalent of a pumpkin spiced latte. As the guitars of the Cranberries’ Dreams jangle, the film’s two leads, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, leave their respective homes and walk through an autumnal-hued New York City with smiles on their faces, their characters unaware that earlier that morning they were anonymously exchanging emails. I must have seen this opening more than 100 times, and while I’d never be so happy to walk to work, it always fills me with a romantic appreciation for life’s potential.

I can’t remember the first time I watched this Nora Ephron-penned and -directed romcom, but I do recall that as a child I would load it into the DVD player at every available opportunity. Based on the 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner, and centred on two competing booksellers – Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly, who runs her mother’s independent children’s bookstore, and Hanks’s Joe Fox, the heir to an impersonal Barnes & Noble-style mega-chain – it’s a standard enemies-to-lovers affair, albeit with a twist that these two rivals are unknowingly emotionally involved online.

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