Message in a Bottle

After The Postman, any film involving correspondence might seem unwise for Kevin Costner, but perhaps anticipating the success of You've Got Mail, he's gone postal again with Message in a Bottle. In Luis Mandoki's adaptation of Nathaniel Sparks's bestseller The Notebook, the written word possesses the power to save not civilization, as in Costner's previous fiasco, but a pair of lonely souls: Theresa Osborne (Robin Wright Penn), a research assistant at the Chicago Tribune adrift since her divorce, and Garret Blake (Costner), a boat repairman from the Outer Banks who's been spiritually shipwrecked since the death of his wife.

When Theresa comes across the title missive -- a letter Blake wrote to his dead wife and cast into the deep -- she's moved by his fustian prose, as are Tribune readers when her boss (Robbie Coltrane, note-perfect and underused) puts it in his column. Theresa wins the assignment to track the mystery writer down, and their mating dance is alternately cute and saccharine. Paul Newman adds edge and class as Blake's lovable curmudgeon dad until the script shoves him into overblown histrionics, but the film lacks any dramatic momentum other than contrived crises. Will the relationship survive Blake's inevitable discovery of how his letter was published in the paper? Are we to make anything of the film's turgid intermingling of love, the sea, and death? With its overblown, manipulative climax, this paean to the power of language should have paid more attention to its dialogue in the script stage.

-- Peter Keough