You've Got Mail.

You've Got Mail is based on Ernst Lubitsch's heartwarming yet candid 1940 movie, The Shop around the Corner, one of the few Hollywood films that really captures the European flavor of their settings, in this case the economically depressed Budapest of the early thirties. The script by Phoebe and Nora Ephron (which Nora directed) has used only one of the strands of the original plot (a young man and woman using pen names court each other by mail - here e-mail - not realizing they already know and loathe each other), and has relocated it to Rudy Giuliani's new, tourist-friendly, family-friendly New York City: street fairs for children, all bars are called Starbucks, and not a beggar or hooker in sight. The movie's characters suit this dream city. The tycoon-hero (Tom Hanks), whose Borders-type super bookstore threatens to drive the heroine's children's bookstore out of business, is basically a nice guy even before he falls in love. (He's happy to chaperone his little half-brother and niece on weekend excursions.) And Meg Ryan is never so cute as when she's sassing the capitalist who loves her. You know these two are made for each other but you have to wait two-and-a-quarter hours for them to find out.

The Ephrons have invented so much for their remake that they should feel justified in regarding comparisons as odious. Yet one overriding comparison kept infiltrating my odious mind: Lubitsch's film was full of pain and fear of poverty, and these emotions somehow made the comedy funnier and the final triumph of love sweeter. In the new movie, nothing is as stake, nothing hurts, nothing matters. Yes, Meg wants to save her little enterprise from rich wolves, but she is so trim, so modestly soignee, so unremittingly nice that even President Clinton couldn't detect her pain, much less feel it. (When Ryan works her facial muscles trying to achieve intensity, the audience may feel quite another kind of pain.) She's a smart cookie who will get another job, and all her employees are either young enough to survive or old enough to retire on sound investments. And it's not as if Hanks is opening a strip joint in Ryan's tidy little neighborhood. As Ephron is honest enough to show, the kids who once went to Ryan's store now ensconce themselves in aisles of the superstore, happily reading or playing board games - the same sight that greets me every time I visit Borders or Barnes and Noble.

Tom Hanks is, expectedly, deft and pleasing, yet I kept wishing that Bill Murray had been cast to give the role some real insolence, some edge, so that the hero's emotional warming might be made more dramatic. Lubitsch's writer, Samson Raphaelson, structured his script so that the prickly lovers come together at Christmas, the season of good will. The Ephrons let their plot shuffle on into springtime, the season of rebirth. This, too, should be appropriate, but since Hanks has been making puppy-dog eyes at Ryan for over half the movie while she keeps snapping, "Sorry, gotta go now," the audience may feel less rebirth than relief at the final embrace. You've Got Mail is bright, too bright, funny, self-congratulatory in its funniness, sharp, and so hip that the sharpness goes to work on your teeth.