Old Capone seems to have gotten a bad taste in his mouth from that MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE.
With movies like Bull Durham, JFK, A Perfect World, Field of Dreams, The Untouchables, and No Way Out on his résumé, it's hard to dislike Kevin Costner sometimes. "Message in a Bottle" makes it a whole lot easier. With this film, Costner is banking on the fact that everyone (or at least women) finds him irresistible and worthy of shagging. I don't mean to pick on Costner, but sometimes his choices boggle my mind. This film is slow and long, and while I'm not again a movie taking it's time getting somewhere, the payoff in this movie (if you can call it that) is almost non-existent.
The story revolves around a man whose wife has died sending her beyond-the-grave letters via messages in bottles. Robin Wright Penn plays a Chicago Tribune researcher who, while on vacation, finds on of these letters washed up on the beach and is intrigued enough by its beautiful sentiments to show her columnist boss (Robbie Coltrane, in a wasted performance). Without telling her, Coltrane runs the letter in his column, and readers respond in droves over the sweetness of it all. Eventually, another letter from Costner to his dead wife surfaces that someone else found who happened to see the column, and eventually Robin decides to use her investigative skills to track the guy down. Did I mention that she's a divorced mother and that her ex-husband married a younger piece of ass? We're, of course, supposed to assume that this fact makes Robin vulnerable and in need of the love of a man like the one writing all these letters. So she finally tracks him down to the seaside community in South Carolina, where he lives with his father, played by Paul Newman. Paul Newman's role in this is probably the best thing in this film; he essentially plays a part similar to the one Robert Duvall plays in "A Civil Action," the wise old fool. When we first see Costner, he's refurbishing an old boat (another sensitive-guy thing apparently). She doesn't say anything about finding the letters, but as soon as she sees that he's not deformed, she sets her sights on snagging him as her sex slave. Even though his wife has been dead for two years, he still loves her and misses her and can't push his life forward without her. I don't want to got into the plot any more because I don't want to ruin it for those brave (and awake)enough to sit through this. I bet you can never guess whether they finally fall in love, or what happens when he finally finds out about the letters being found and published. And then there's this ending, which seems utterly pointless. But I can't fault the filmmaker for that since this story is based on a book. There are some nice scene between Paul Newman and Robin Wright Penn but that hardly makes up for the rest of this unbearable mess.
A lot of women in the audience seemed to respond to the movie at various points, so I won't say that nobody will enjoy this, just nobody that I would want to be friends with. This film is a dime-store romance novel that should have Harlequin stamped on it instead of Warner Bros. I'm not against love stories or sentimental films at all (I enjoyed "The Horse Whisperer," for example), but not when they are done like this. I have no idea if the book's popularity will propel this film to No. 1 when it opens in a couple weeks (there are also previews this weekend and next), but I anticipate a quick and painless death for this one. The scariest part of it is that I'm still very much looking forward to Costner's upcoming "For the Love of the Game" and "13 Days." I have given up on you yet, you egocentric bastard.
Thank God the day after I saw this, I went to a screening of "Rushmore" and cleansed my palate.
Later,
Capone
