Message in a bottle

*

Cast: Kevin Costner, Robin Wright Penn, Paul Newman

Director: Luis Mandoki

Rating: M

Reviewer: Peter Calder

Here's the problem: when a love story captures our imagination, we want the lovers to love. But for most of this film's generous running time (at 126 minutes it overstays its welcome for about half an hour) I was repressing the urge to give Kevin Costner a damn good shake and a slap around the chops.

"He talks about as much as a fish," his irascible father Dodge (Newman) comments at one point. It turns out to be a bit of an exaggeration. The trouble with Costner's performance is that even when he is talking he seems to be withholding himself utterly, acting with his whole personality facing away from us.

In two scenes when he does smile (and it's perhaps no accident that both times he's playing childish games with his beloved) it doesn't ring true. It has the enforced jocularity of a psychiatric patient who has just upped his medication.

Costner's wooden style may have perfectly suited a cavalry officer living alone in the land of the Oglala Sioux or an ice-cold expert employed as a bodyguard to a pop-star but for a romantic lead it just doesn't work.

Not even when the romantic lead is grief-stricken boat-builder Garret Blake, who lives on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and copes with the death of his wife by "sending" her long typed letters in bottles tossed into the boiling Atlantic.

One of these letters washes up just where love-bruised Theresa Osborne (Penn) is mooching along another Atlantic beach and she uses her skills as a newspaper researcher to track down the man whose in-touch-with-his feelings prose has her swooning.

Check your watch at this point and you'll realise that the course of this love isn't going to run smooth -- and that it's going to run pretty slow as well.

Luis Mandoki showed that he has the feel for emotional authenticity when he directed Melanie Griffith as an alcoholic in When a Man Loves a Woman but he devotes too much of his energy here to long tracking shots from the helicopter of the Maine coast (standing in for the Carolinas) and a couple of yachts including a 12m, gaff-rigged, golden-varnished schooner which is the sexiest thing on show.

The central romantic story is so textureless that we have no real sense of the characters' inner lives. We must infer them from the surroundings -- Garret has left Catherine's painting studio untouched as a shrine and scratches desultorily at old boats with sandpaper rather than building new ones; Theresa gazes mournfully at the new-baby bliss of her remarried husband -- because nothing like an authentic emotion ever seems to cross their faces.

The leads' shortcomings are just underlined by the performance of the star. Newman who, like all great actors, just gets better with age, conveys so much with a couple of lines of dialogue (his uneasy relationship with alcohol) or a sideways glance (his tentative trust of the newcomer) and when he pulls emotional rank on his son, he is just plain awesome.

To its credit the screenplay serves up a single surprise by sticking with the decidedly non-Hollywood ending of Nicholas Sparks' novel, but otherwise there's not much to delight or divert here. It's strictly for the fans of the sickly and sentimental.