'Message in the Bottle', another romantic movie

By Tam Notosusanto

JAKARTA (JP): It's funny how films and entertainment can be made out of other people's sorrow and despair. But it has been done so many times, as evidenced in, among others, Message In A Bottle.

The film is about two people trying to overcome their anguish as they discover each other and learn to "live" again. Garret Blake (Kevin Costner) is coming to terms with the painful reality that his beloved wife Catherine, who passed away two years earlier, is really gone. Meanwhile, Theresa Osborne (Robin Wright Penn), is coping with a bitter divorce. As the two fall in love, they realize that their world has not really come to an end.

Their love story begins with a bottle that Theresa finds half buried in the sand as she jogs along the beach one day. The bottle contains a typed letter addressed to a Catherine, from someone identifying himself only as "G". The letter expresses this person's love for Catherine. Overwhelmed by this romantic declaration, Theresa sets out to use her capabilities as a researcher at the prominent The Chicago Tribune newspaper to find this person. She becomes determined especially after her supervisor, the corpulent columnist Charlie Toschi (Robbie Coltrane), publishes the letter in the newspaper, and in return gets hundreds of letters from readers, one of them claiming to have also discovered a letter from "G" for Catherine on a beach.

Before we even have the chance to ask why a columnist in a big newspaper thinks it's a great idea to print a letter found on a beach, or question the plausibility of finding such a needle in a haystack in Theresa's search for "G", screenwriter Gerald Di Pego has already zoomed through the whole process, fast-forwarding us to the moment when Theresa eventually meets her mystery man.

Only in Hollywood would Meg Ryan's faceless e-mail pal in You've Got Mail turn out to be Tom Hanks, and not Howard Stern or Marilyn Manson. Only in Hollywood, too, would the man beautiful Robin Wright Penn seeks turn out to be the handsome Kevin Costner.

Of course, everybody who goes to see this movie knows that Costner plays the guy, so there's no real suspense when Theresa walks into a sleepy North Carolina fishing town and finally meets Garret, the "G" she's been looking for.

And they sure waste no time. Before long, Garret and Theresa are falling in love. After two years of being a brooding recluse, shut out from any new relationship, Garret, a sailor and boatbuilder, final starts opening up. And it's this metropolitan chick who manages to steal his heart.

"There are only two women in my life that I care for," Garret proclaims wittily, "Catherine and some big city girl who is loud- mouthed and pushy."

The relationship is evidently therapeutic for Garret, his spirit is up, and he travels to Chicago to visit Theresa and meet her son, Jason (child actor Jesse James, who plays the only son of single parent Helen Hunt in As Good As It Gets, plays a similar role here). And Garret restarts a shelved project of his: building his "signature boat".

Nicholas Sparks' novel, adapted for this film, is about people opening a new chapter in their lives, attempting to leave the painful past behind. And this proves not to be easy. Message In A Bottle interestingly mimics Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, with a man haunted by the memory of his dead wife, and a woman struggling to step into her shoes.

"It's beautiful the way you love her," says a tearful Theresa to Garret in a scene, "That's why I wanted to find you."

Director Luis Mandoki, who has made various melancholic films like Gaby, A True Story (1987) and When A Man Loves A Woman (1994), did a fine job cooking up this 125-minute melodrama, which is not a bad show at all, although unexceptional and inspiring as well. The grand, sweeping music of Gabriel Yared (who wrote the scores for The English Patient and City of Angels), and the spectacular cinematography of Caleb Deschanel help bring out the emotion. And if the tragic conclusion is a letdown, well, who can blame this movie for wanting to be a three-handkerchief picture?

As Garret, Costner is taciturn but sympathetic. He may not be a remarkable actor, but this is his finest performance since Dances with Wolves, after a doomed nine-year string of playing superheroes and macho men. Meanwhile, Wright Penn gives an adequate performance, although here she is not as subtle and wonderful as in Forrest Gump and The Crossing Guard. She instead tends to go back to her old soap-opera days, i.e. lots of crying, lots of wailing.

The shining star of this film is, of course, Paul Newman. Playing Dodge, Garret's elderly father, he wins the audience's hearts by being a sardonic man with a knack of shooting out repartees.

"If I was 150 years younger," he teases Theresa, "you'd be in trouble, young lady."

Newman's Dodge is also Garret's conscience, showing great concern for his son's course of life."You choose between yesterday and tomorrow," he tells Garret. "Pick one." This is a well-written role, marvelously played by one of America's acting icons. If everything else in Message In A Bottle tends to bore you, Newman surely won't.