‘Message’ A Gorgeous, Goopy Romantic Fantasy
In “Message in a Bottle,” Kevin Costner plays a man of few words and many cashmere V-necks.
He’s one of those sunburned, laconic loners, a Marlboro Man type of guy, and Costner is well-suited to the part. He is creasing up nicely, and he has developed a Gary Cooper-esque “yeah” that conveys a lot of meaning: “Yeah, I’ll teach you to drive my sailboat,” maybe, or “Yeah, my clothes look casual, but they’re really expensive” or “Yeah, it’ll take me awhile to warm up, but then I promise I’ll love you for the rest of your days.”
That last choice is what Robin Wright Penn is hoping for. She’s a lowly newspaper assistant and, like all lowly assistants, she has a gorgeous brownstone home, a stunning wardrobe and a gigantic private office with a view. Near the beginning of the movie, she stumbles onto the titular message, a love note written by Costner. After pretending to have run into him accidentally, Penn falls in love with Costner and becomes friends with his rascally dad (Paul Newman, and it’s kind of sad to see him in his first codger role).
The conflict of the movie, then, is “Will Costner find out that Penn is fibbing to him?” And “Can their love survive?” And “Will he loan her his expensively rumpled cashmere sweaters?”
Not to obsess about the sweaters, but it’s a very surface-y movie, romantic and unbelievable in the way of a Danielle Steel book or a commercial for island getaways. We’re never given a reason for Costner and Penn to fall for each other, except their mutual fondness for nautical metaphors (“You are my true north,” “Memories can die like the tide,” etc.), so we don’t believe in the enduring beauty of their love.
Everyone and everything is gorgeous and Penn in particular has to spend so much time sauntering through romantic montage sequences that the friend who accompanied me to the screening whispered, “If this were a Julia Roberts movie, she’d be trying on hats in this scene.” If only Penn were trying on hats, then she’d have something to cover up the snarliest, snaggliest hairdo in recent memory.
There’s a certain amount of appeal to a stunningly photographed romantic fantasy of this sort, in which the perfect person for you is halfway across the country, but you find him or her anyway. But “Message in a Bottle” is quite long, and it goes way too heavy on the shots of people making goo-goo eyes at each other while breathy, Lilith Fair girls warble on the soundtrack.
About the time that Costner’s character, realizing the movie needs a big finish, decides to head his boat into a violent storm, it occurred to me that there couldn’t possibly be enough Douglas to save this movie from itself.
“MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE” Locations: Lincoln Heights, Newport, Spokane Valley Mall, Coeur d’Alene Cinemas, Post Falls Cinema Credits: Directed by Luis Mandoki, starring Kevin Costner, Robin Wright Penn, Paul Newman Running time: 2:06 Rating: PG-13