`Message in a Bottle” is a movie that wants us to believe that true love doesn’t die; it just gets recycled. But only if there’s a ocean around to do triple service as romantic backdrop, symbol of fate and bottle drop.
Does that description sound cynical? The movie, unfortunately, invites it. “Message in a Bottle” — which stars Kevin Costner and Robin Wright Penn as bottle-crossed lovers Garret Blake and Theresa Osborne — is a picture made with high visual style and some emotional intensity, with good actors and obviously good intentions. All the accoutrements of classic movie romance are here: crashing ocean waves, long walks on the beach, heavy flirtations on piers and sailboats, candle-lit dinners, soft music and swooning embraces in the night, all served up with impressive solemnity and deadpan glamor. And of course, there are also Costner and Wright Penn, photogenic lovers with wistful eyes, fit bodies and great tans.
But in this weepy tale of lovers who meet when one finds a love letter in a bottle in the ocean, there’s no real heart beating beneath the beautiful flesh. I hope I won’t be accused of being a heartless antiromantic if I say that the movie “Message in a Bottle” strikes me as a pure, unadulterated crock. And that without Paul Newman — who plays a sardonic old ex-drunk wisecracking his way through the movie — the whole thing might collapse into seductive nonsense, with feeble echoes of “Bridges of Madison County.”
Much of the problem lies in the original story, an absurd plot taken from an even more absurd novel: Nicholas Sparks’ earnest, heart-on-sleeve tale of Boston newspaper columnist Theresa Osborne and her quest to find her perfect man.
Who is he? The lovelorn and eloquent boatbuilding North Carolina widower Garret, who has been tossing bottles into the Atlantic Ocean containing impassioned letters to his dead wife, Katherine. When one of them washes ashore at melancholy divorced mom Theresa’s feet on a New England beach holiday, she becomes determined to find the unknown author, to see if he really is the paragon of sensitivity and passion he seems from these notes to Katherine. More bottles and messages accumulate after the letter is printed in Theresa’s newspaper. And track him down she does — while unwisely neglecting to tell him about her discovery of his secrets. Then love, fate and the Atlantic Ocean step in.
Sparks’ book was written in the usual flavorless, uninspired contemporary bestseller style; it lingered over all the details of Theresa and Garret’s first dates with a thoroughness that suggested a kind of emotional pornography. In the movie, where director Luis Mandoki (“When a Man Loves a Woman”) can show us that beautiful coastline, and where the original flat characters are enlivened by Costner and Wright Penn — and especially by Newman as Garret’s crusty old dad, Dodge Blake — there’s more, visually and physically, to enjoy.
But not enough. The movie’s script, by ex-Chicagoan Gerald DiPego (“Phenomenon”), is an improvement on the book — but only because DiPego has juiced up some characters, brought in a few more (such as Theresa’s bubbly galpal Lina, played by Illeana Douglas, and Garret’s surly brother-in law Johnny, played by John Savage) and added family feuds, dark secrets and tortured memories.
Some of those changes, though, are as silly as the original story. The movie Theresa — who is now researcher for a Chicago Tribune columnist (Robbie Coltrane’s Charlie Toschi) instead of a columnist herself — works at an ultra-glitzy paper the likes of which few of us, especially anybody who works at the Tribune, have ever seen.
Re-created on a Hollywood sound stage, this “Chicago Tribune” is a shiny, ultra-swank news emporium, with breathtaking 18th story skyline vistas, a shopping-mall-style atrium, no discernible editors and lots of scurrying extras running hither and yon in the backgrounds. What happens there is ceaselessly amazing, not least when researcher Theresa writes a sample story, submits it to her boss Charlie and is instantly rewarded with her own byline, her own column and her own office: a happenstance just as likely (and frequent) in real life as, say, the comet striking Earth in “Deep Impact.”
But never mind this Yellow Brick Road version of The Tribune. The romance itself is just as implausible. After Costner’s flop “The Postman,” I would have thought he would think twice about getting involved in any more movie projects about sending letters through unconventional means. But his instincts fail here too. Garret is supposed to be a big romantic part: a tough but tender guy with a soul glowing beneath his taciturn, sun-scarred surface. But the only spirit we glimpse here is in the fairly ordinary letters Garret is hurling into the water — and those notes (in both movie and book) suggest less the soul of a poet than the craft of a greeting card writer.
It’s hard to believe these nice, tearful letters are putting so many people, including supposedly hardened Tribune scribes, into such a tizzy, much less that they’re bowling over the entire country through the Tribune syndicate: a national fad of which Garret remains puzzlingly unaware. Is the country that starved for affection?
Director Luis Mandoki — in “Gaby,” “White Palace” and “When a Man Loves a Woman” — has made a string of modern domestic dramas and love stories. And he’s developed a glossy modern soap opera style without having the scripts to support it. His movies have a “look,” but by the end of “Message in a Bottle,” it’s a vacant look. His movie has been loaded with so many coincidences and contrivances, it’s like a leaky boat in a storm.
In the face of all this gush and mush, Newman easily steals the picture. His Dodge is tangier than the granddad of the book. And though, in other hands, he might have become another cliche — a crusty, snappish old man getting on everyone’s case — Newman puts a charge behind his lines, getting laughs in a movie otherwise perilously close to unintentional comedy. Those oceanic blue eyes of his suggest a world of romantic longing somewhere beneath his tart wisecracks — and I suspect some women in the audience might be happier if Dodge went after Theresa himself, instead of leaving the field to his more reticent son.
Costner is unlucky. He has to play star-crossed anguish without the right lines or scenes. Wright Penn has to convince us she’s fallen for an unknown guy pouring out his heart into bottles. But Newman gets another of his vintage smart-aleck parts, and he seizes the day.
Romance used to be one of the prime commodities of the commercial American movie. But, ever since the go-go ’80s, it’s been diminished, shoved aside by car-chases, explosions and risque antics, often relegated to TV shows and telephone ads. (“Titanic” is the exception that proves the rule.) Is it an ominous sign that “Message in a Bottle,” a failed transcendental love-after-death romance, follows “You’ve Got Mail,” a failed sophisticated topical romantic comedy? Love is blind, they say, but unfortunately that goes for too many current movie love stories as well.
”MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE”
(star) (star)
Directed by Luis Mandoki; written by Gerald DiPego; photographed by Caleb Deschanel; edited by Steven Weisberg; production designed by Jeffrey Beecroft; music by Gabriel Yared; produced by Denise DiNovi, Jim Wilson, Kevin Costner. A Warner Bros. release; opens Friday. Running time: 2:06. MPAA rating: PG-13 (language, sensuality, nudity, violence).
THE CAST
Garret Blake ………… Kevin Costner
Theresa Osborne ……… Robin Wright Penn
Dodge Blake …………. Paul Newman
Johnny Land …………. John Savage
Lina Paul …………… Illeana Douglas
Charlie Toschi ………. Robbie Coltrane
