You’ve Got Mail

For Love: Kathleen Kelly (Meg Ryan) and Joe Fox (Tom Hanks) are pen pals who met in an AOL chat room.

Or Money: Unbeknownst to either, Kathleen and Joe are business rivals—his Barnes & Noble-esque megastore is opening around the corner from the small children’s bookshop she owns.

In Sleepless, Meg plays a journalist; one who uses her position at the Baltimore Sun Times to finance the full-scale stalking of Tom Hanks’s Sam. She puts a background check, a private eye, and a flight from Maryland to Washington state on the paper. (Good to know: A journalist in Baltimore in 1992 made about $31, 297, which today is approximately $53,098.05.) How does her editor (Rosie O’Donnell) not yell at her for that? She doesn’t even interview him, she just stares at him from the middle of the street and then flies home. Meanwhile, Sam is able to pick up his young son and move to a houseboat in an entirely new city. Very reasonable choice! The film’s attitude toward money could probably be summed up by one scene: Tom Hanks needs to steal a stranger’s cab to chase his son, Jonah, to the Empire State Building. To get the cab, he yells, “Money, all right? Money, money, money!” while throwing bills in the air. Money: People want it and this can be annoying, but it’s plentiful, never a problem to come by.

Only You, a forgotten classic that I will hype forever even though Robert Downey Jr.’s fast-talking charmer is named Mr. Wright, is awash in pricey grand gestures. Faith’s expenditures include a spur-of-the-moment flight to Venice, a rental car, multiple gorgeous hotel rooms in different cities, and a handful of dinners in lovely, expensive restaurants. Also, on her teacher’s salary—$35, 813 in 1992, about $57,520.95 today—she apparently already had a wardrobe full of stunning, often-backless gowns. Her Mr. Wright is a lower-level shoe salesman who: gifts a woman who already rejected him a pair of fancy shoes (not knockoffs); hires an actor at the last minute in a country he’s never been to; outfits said actor with a wig and gold medallion; and rents hotel rooms for them both—in a hotel Joan Collins stayed in, no less. The phone calls alone must have cost him a fortune. The planning, the scheming, the cost!

Money is just water in these films. It’s everywhere and therefore not particularly notable, and this functions most strangely in You’ve Got Mail. In the film, which is a flawless and charming example of the parallel reality of rom-coms, Kathleen Kelly is being run out of business by Fox Books. Of course, of course, this is their central conflict. But never are finances mentioned. A small business owner was making about $47,064.78 in 1998 (about $68K today), but this impending closure is a tragedy for sentimental reasons only: the loss of Kathleen’s store is equated to the loss of her late mother—who founded it—and the loss of her beloved, oddball employees. But unemployment, financial ruin: these things are never on the table. She’s not in danger of losing the apartment she used to share with her now-ex-boyfriend (double rent and no income, no problem!) or any of her sweater sets. It’s also worth mentioning, that in this film it is Tom Hanks’s father— not Tom Hanks—who owns the houseboat. But of course, there is a houseboat.