The Love Letter (1999) Reviewed by Eugene Novikov http://www.ultimate-movie.com Member: Online Film Critics Society
*1/2 out of four
Starring Kate Capshaw, Tom Everett Scott, Blythe Danner, Tom Selleck, Ellen DeGeneres. Rated PG-13.
It's actually not so bad that Dreamworks decided to release The Love Letter at about the same time as Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace, because this way less people will have to sit through this dreadful little comedy. And no, I really don't feel guilty about wishing this movie death at the box-office. Really, I don't. Not at all.
The plot has been done before -- a mysterious, unaddressed love letter shows up in a small town, causing confusion for everyone who reads it. The center of the ensuing disaster is bookstore owner Helen (Kate Capshaw, and by the way, what is it with bookstore owner main characters? In the past year and a half we've seen them in Life is Beautiful, You've Got Mail, this movie, and the upcoming Notting Hill), who finds the letter in between couch cushions in the bookstore. She immediately starts testing other people to see who it might be from, and comes to the (incorrect) conclusion that the author of the note is a young employee played by Tom Everett Scott. He, reading the letter himself, assumes that she wrote it for him.
After a while, they fall in love (well, duh). Kate feels guilty about getting in a relationship with someone more than twenty years younger than her, and she also feels guilty because at the same time she is also involved with the town fireman (Tom Selleck). To add to her turmoil, her mother shows up (Blythe Danner, who apparently must have had her daughter when she was about 9) and her trusted bookstore manager (deadpan Ellen DeGeneres) quits.
Supporting characters aren't called supporting for nothing. Their purpose isn't just to move the plot along, they're also supposed to give the storyline a backbone. To do this, they must exhibit at least marginal depth and must also be interesting. Rarely can a movie work if it puts an interesting protagonist in the middle and surrounds her with hackneyed, dull, cardboard secondary characters, especially when at the core of the movie is the protagonist's various interactions with them. This is The Love Letter's damning error. Capshaw's character is as good as I have seen present in recent romantic comedies, but the people that surround her are all either underwritten or purely one-dimensional.
Because of that, The Love Letter is awkward and insincere. Even worse -- it's a bore. I liked Capshaw and her Helen, but everyone else is painfully fake, undermining the little drama or sexual tension that has the potential to exist. There is nothing particularly hilarious about all this either -- and besides DeGeneres' wisecracks, there's little that is even a little amusing.
This is not a completely thoughtless film and director Peter Ho-Sun Chan does a good job of portraying Helen's yearnings and various subtle complexities. But it's far from profound. There isn't a common theme running through the proceedings, thus the movie seems thoughtfully pointless.
Really, this is a harmless little movie; it's far from an abomination and it's not torturous to sit through. But bad, it is. Awful, it also is. The Love Letter is a failure, and an inane failure at that. ©1999 Eugene Novikov‰
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