Message in a Bottle

About five times during Message in a Bottle, I checked the time on my wristwatch as well as my pulse to see if I was still alive. The screen romance between stars Kevin Costner and Robin Wright Penn is so labored, the movie makes the insufferably long Meet Joe Black look like a coming attraction by comparison.

Conveniently released for the Valentine’s Day date crowd, Message in a Bottle is shamelessly sentimental and sappy at the same time. The schmaltz reaches the level of one of those television coffee commercials. Not the Taster’s Choice romance series, mind you, but the Folger’s Crystals Christmas commercial where Peter comes home from college.

Adopted from the best seller written by Nicholas Sparks, the pharmaceutical salesman turned author who hit it big with "The Notebook," Message in a Bottle follows the incredulous romance between a Chicago newspaperwoman and a North Carolina shipbuilder.

Single mom scribe Theresa Osborne (Wright Penn) finds a corked bottle on the beach while vacationing in New England. The bottle contains a love letter from "G" to his "true north" named Catherine. To make a really long story short, Theresa goes on assignment for her newspaper to find the writer after a columnist prints the letter verbatim.

Theresa travels to the North Carolina Outer Banks. "G" is male babe Garret Blake (Costner), and the romance is on. Garret lost his wife two years earlier and is still in mourning. The two begin a cross country relationship that one senses isn’t going to make it.

Thank goodness the producer cast Paul Newman as Garret’s crusty father, Dodge. Newman picks up the slack left by Costner’s uninspired performance. All the way through this melancholic tear jerker, I kept saying to myself, "Costner is miscast. Where’s Nicholas Cage?"

I have fond memories of the Outer Banks from my days as a college student in the early 1970’s. Little to my surprise did I see in the end credits that the filming took place in Maine, not North Carolina. Given all of this film’s contrivances, it figures.