On its own, all of this could be annoyingly cutesy, but it’s balanced out by Kathleen’s deep and abiding melancholy. She gets her happy ending with Joe, of course, but the film is also about the passage of time and the heartbreaking realization that even the most beautiful things can’t last forever. She finds love, but she’s forced to close the shop her mother left her and forgo her dream of one day leaving it to her own daughter. “I feel like a part of me has died,” she says as she gazes at the empty shelves. “And my mother has died all over again, and no one can ever make it right.”
When I think of the film now, the scene that first comes to mind isn’t that climactic moment when Kathleen tears up and tells Joe, “I wanted it to be you,” lovely though that scene is. Instead, it’s the moments when she’s alone—the one where Harry Nilsson croons “Remember” as she decorates the Christmas tree in the shop and admits that she misses her mother so much that she can’t breathe; or the one where she contemplates her future. “Sometimes I wonder about my life,” she writes to Joe. “I lead a small life—well, valuable but small. And sometimes I wonder, do I do it because I like it, or because I haven’t been brave? So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book when… shouldn’t it be the other way around?”
That pensiveness which permeates the whole film, the same one we always seem to feel at this time of year as the leaves turn and the temperature plummets, is something that unites all three of these releases—and is the thing that sets Ryan apart from the other prolific rom-com heroine of the ’90s: Julia Roberts.
If the latter, in all her grinning, glossy-haired, ravishingly dressed glory, represents the promise of a warm, wild summer—Pretty Woman’s Vivian going on a sun-drenched shopping spree, My Best Friend’s Wedding’s Julianne kicking back at a baseball game, Anna lying on a park bench with Hugh Grant at the end of Notting Hill, Runaway Bride’s Maggie escaping on horseback—then Ryan, forever curled up in an armchair wearing a cardigan and clutching a cup of cocoa, symbolizes the realities of autumn. While Vivian sings “Kiss” in a sudsy bathtub as she eyes up Richard Gere, a sneezy Kathleen prepares to let Joe into her apartment by putting on a trench coat over her crumpled pajamas, binning her countless used tissues, and hiding her dirty dishes. Roberts is often the woman we want to be, but Ryan is much closer to the one we are.