THE LOVE LETTER (DreamWorks) Starring: Kate Capshaw, Tom Everett Scott, Tom Selleck, Ellen DeGeneres, Julianne Nicholson, Blythe Danner, Geraldine McEwan. Screenplay: Maria Maggenti, based on the novel by Cathleen Schine. Producers: Sarah Pilsbury, Midge Sanford and Kate Capshaw. Director: Peter Ho-sun Chan. MPAA Rating: PG-13 (profanity, adult themes, sexual situations) Running Time: 89 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.
To your list of absolute cinematic oxymorons -- you know, like "Pauly Shore comedy" or "Keanu Reeves performance" -- please add the following: "bittersweet farce." That's the disastrous combination served up by THE LOVE LETTER, a film that fairly screams for a more frivolous treatment. The basic set-up is pure farce, with bookstore proprietor and recent divorcee Helen MacFarquahar (Kate Capshaw) of picturesque Loblolly by the Sea, Massachusetts discovering a beautifully poetic love letter between the cushions of a couch in her shop. Both the the writer and the addressee are anonymous, leading Helen to wonder if it might be for her. Her suspicions become stronger when her young summer employee Johnny (Tom Everett Scott) begins flirting with her, little realizing that Johnny has spotted the letter and believes, in turn, that it is from Helen to him.
Thus begins a tale which initially appears headed towards a wild sequence of misunderstandings, as Helen's co-worker Janet (Ellen DeGeneres) also spies the letter and suspects it to be to her from hunky fireman George (Tom Selleck). That might have been a clever, breezy entertainment, something considerably less labored than the mess delivered by screenwriter Maria Maggenti (from Cathleen Schine's novel) and director Peter Ho-sun Chan. Their tale is intended, I suppose, to be a touching tale of a middle-aged woman trying to re-discover romance, a sensitively portrayed May-December relationship mixed with the star-crossed interactions of Helen and high school classmate George (who, it turns out, has carried a torch from afar for lo these twenty years). We should understand the way the letter affects Helen, the way it closes one door in her life and opens her up to the opportunities she has missed and the opportunities still to come.
If Maggenti and Chan had offered some characters remotely resembling three-dimensional people, it might even have worked. THE LOVE LETTER makes no effort whatsoever to explain Johnny's interest in Helen, spends about thirty seconds establishing Janet as little more than comic relief before creating a blink-and-you'll-miss-it sub-plot regarding her jealousy of Helen, and wraps up with an out-of-left-field relationship between two characters about whom we know virtually nothing. Key relationships (like that between Helen and her absentee mother, played by Blythe Danner) materialize out of thin air, and supporting characters (like Helen's grandmother, played by TITANIC's Gloria Stuart) serve no purpose. Even Capshaw's Helen, the film's center, is an enigma. For a film that apparently wants you to care who ends up with whom, THE LOVE LETTER gives you none of the tools to do so. It's a whodunnit with no clues.
Somehow, in the middle of this clumsy confection, one genuinely interesting character appears. As Jennifer, another employee of Helen's who dotes on unrequitedly on Johnny, Julianne Nicholson is wonderfully sweet and achingly self-conscious. Masking her insecurities behind her college course sociological analysis, she makes for a great character in a story of how romantic happiness can be thwarted both from without and within. The troublie is, she's the only character in the film who belongs in such a story. Everyone else plays the kind of functional, cardboard role you'd expect to find in...well, a farce about a love letter of unknown authorship changing hands indiscriminately. There's not a solid laugh to be found in this pretty to look at but ill-conceived romantic comedy, except at the idea that someone thought a bittersweet farce could work.
On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 dead letters: 3.
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