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He plays a grieving fisherman and boat maker living in the Outer
Banks of North Carolina, and he’s nicely paired with Robin Wright Penn as a
researcher for the Chicago Tribune. Wright Penn doesn’t play the usual hard-
driving, nervous wreck from the city but a charming, gregarious woman. She’s
sensitive enough to be patient with this wounded hunk of man, yet sharp
enough to draw him out.

“Message in a Bottle” is an exceptionally good movie in its first
hour and an exceptionally bad one in its second. I think that averages out
to a no-go, but there are lovely things in this film, particularly Wright
Penn’s performance. She has been such a chameleon onscreen that it has taken
a while to realize what a major talent she is. Her full-out yet detailed
acting here leaves no room for guessing.

She plays Theresa, a recent divorcee who goes walking on the beach
one day and finds a message in a bottle. It’s a passionate
letter from a man to his former wife. Like Meg Ryan in “Sleepless in
Seattle,” she has an intense reaction to this stranger’s sensitivity. Using
the newspaper’s resources, she locates and identifies him — and flies down
to meet him.

“Message in a Bottle” blossoms from an inherently interesting set
up — a woman meets a guy she knows everything about, and he doesn’t know
that she knows — into a moving love story. In other films Costner’s
predilection for dead-serious roles has taken him near the edge of
self-parody, but his gravity and dignity seem appropriate this time. Poor
Garret
(Costner) is in pain. When he asks Wright Penn out for the first time he
looks so nervous that, for the moment at least, he’s not even handsome.

For a nice chunk of its running time, the picture — based on the
novel by Nicholas Sparks — is a refreshing look at romance between
grown-ups. The very unromanticness of it is what feels so unguardedly
romantic: He visits her at work. He buys a toy for her kid (a nice kid, not
the usual movie brat). She undresses in front of him with the lights on, and
her underwear isn’t exotic.

What a shame that such a film
could collapse so thoroughly. All the honesty that went into the portrayal
of the love story goes out the window in an effort to provide artificial
conflict. The script concocts a quarrel. It also throws in irrelevant plot
details along the order of this doozy: Theresa writes one article for the
Tribune, and they give her her own office. Must have been some article.

There’s no use waiting for things to get better. Without going into
details, “Message in a Bottle” has an ending that is enragingly idiotic —
and melodramatic in a way that makes the audience wonder how the same minds
that devised the beginning could come up with such a patently false finale.

Director Luis Mandoki (“White Palace”) gets sensitive
performances from the cast, but the script sinks them all. Paul Newman plays
Costner’s old codger of a father, but the movie would have been better off
with a lesser actor in the part. That way Pops might have ended up on the
cutting-room floor, which is where he belonged.