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It's with that in mind that you eventually allow the hyper-melodramatic Message in a Bottle, starring Kevin Costner as the broodingly handsome rustic and Robin Wright Penn as the city sophisticate, to inveigle its way into your foolish heart. But beware, young lovers, wherever you are. It's best that you know the truth now. There is pain to pay for these vicarious emotions.
Director Luis Mandoki pulls a double-cross. Only keeping his end of the tacit agreement through 90% of Message in a Bottle, in the eleventh hour the filmmaker suddenly gets drunk with artistic pretension. He decides a dose of harsh reality, a splash of cold water in the puss, if you will, is just what we suckers deserve for our faithful indulgence. Completely miscalculating, he senselessly adorns the movie with one of the worst endings to come down the cinema pike in years. Blasphemy! We are duped! Oddly, this is one of the few examples of the genre not starring Barbara Streisand. But on that account, we don't feel so betrayed.
That said, the sheer silliness of the fairy tale plot is downright charming. If you don't find it a bit far-fetched in the first place that vacationing news researcher Theresa Osborne (Robin Wright Penn) finds a love letter in a sealed bottle (whilst traipsing the beach along Cape Cod) how about the odds of her tracing the seaworthy missive right back to its sender in record time? Most of us can't figure out how to program our VCRs. But making like Sherlock Holmes, the intense Miss Osborne brings the movie's Holy Grail back to her office in Chicago. Then she hops on the Internet, consults with typewriter experts, bottle aficionados (even a cork specialist), and mayvins of sea currents, and amazingly zeroes in on one Garret Blake (Kevin Costner), small shipbuilder extraordinaire residing in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. The poor lad doesn't stand a chance against this kind of investigatory zeal.
Certain of a fated soul connection to the mysterious letter writer, Theresa doesn't quite sell it that way at the office. She gets her boss to print the letter (written to a Catherine) in his column. Female Chicago swoons, at least for one issue, and it engenders yet more clues about the melancholy mariner. Theresa talks her boss into letting her descend on the dispatcher, just for curiosity's sake, of course.
Making no mention of the bottle, Theresa finds her way onto the dock where Garret Blake is restoring a customer's yacht, and soon insinuates her way into his life. Reading verbatim from "Falling In Love #101," they sail, they frolic, they eat, they kiss, etc., all to the enchanting backdrop of the Maine locations that beautifully serve as the North Carolina seascape. There's nary a scene that doesn't begin with a rainbow and end with a sunset. They share cute little secrets. But not the big ticket items. At least not yet. She keeps meaning to tell him about the bottle, or so she later contends.
As the getting-to-know-you aspects of the evolving love affair unfold, Theresa confirms that the much-adored Catherine is Garret's deceased wife. He is still entirely devoted to her memory, and the associated sadness has even stalled a personal shipbuilding project. Paints and canvasses in an untouched corner of his house serve as a shrine to the artist-wife's memory.
Nonetheless, Theresa spends an idyllic holiday exploring the bucolic joys of Garret's domain. Following that, it's time for Country Mouse to visit City Mouse in Chicago, meet her adolescent son, and see how things go on her turf. Theresa's lady friends drool approvingly when the homespun heartthrob makes an unannounced visit to the newspaper.
Nicely understated acting performances, featuring a low-key Mr. Costner and a tightly wound Miss Wright Penn, give the movie the smidgen of integrity that otherwise seems so out of reach for director Mandoki. The only supporting stint worthy of mention is a welcome appearance by Paul Newman as Garret's former-alcoholic dad, Dodge ("Like the pickup," he tells Theresa). A glib reminder of missed opportunities, the cupidic old salt admonishes his laconic son to choose between the dead past and the living present. It's a treat to have Mr. Newman step down a moment from his salad dressing label and remind us why he is such a national treasure.
Because there is no interesting side business to supplement the story in Message in a Bottle, wondering whether Garret will ever let go of the past and allow himself happiness eventually becomes the movie's only real issue. Gerald DiPego's poorly written script (based on the novel by Nicholas Sparks) hasn't the stuff to support anything besides sheer fluff. So the director fills the bulk of his movie's empty spaces with great scenery and generically momentous music. And it gets old fast. Yet we still forgive the feature-length folly its ineptitude, as long as it's entertaining. What's the harm? Then Message in a Bottle gets all wet when director Mandoki springs his deceitful conclusion onto us.
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