The film would never be mistaken for high art, but if it's romantic comedy you're after, this one...is about as good as the genre has produced in the last few years.
Tools:
Recommend review to a friend »
"Kate & Leopold" comes this close (image of two fingers being held as closely together as possible without actually touching), this close, to getting an unqualified recommendation. It's quite good, but it takes very nearly the whole first half of the movie to get started, and then after a few forays into delightful romantic comedy falls headfirst into complete but welcome predictability. The film would never be mistaken for high art, but if it's romantic comedy you're after, this one with Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman is about as good as the genre has produced in the last few years.
Romantic comedy itself has always been a dicey proposition. Ms. Ryan has been in some of the best of them, like "When Harry Met Sally" and "Sleepless in Seattle," but it hasn't been enough to entice everyone into a theater, especially men. The genre has the unfortunate and unwarranted reputation of being mostly for women, the kind of films girlfriends and wives drag their boyfriends or husbands into kicking and screaming. Once there, the guys often find the experience not as bad as they'd expected, but with the next romantic comedy they're invited to the cycle starts all over. Alternatively, males have found the romantic comedy an expedient genre when in doubt about a new date. Usually, one can't go too far wrong with a romantic comedy in terms of possible embarrassment or insult to a recent acquaintance. So it goes with "Kate & Leopold," a thoroughly harmless and often engaging 2001 representative of the breed.
The movie begins with a time travel angle, which may or may not produce a tingle of anticipation from viewers. It's an old gimmick, and in this case it takes a while to get started. Nor is it presented in any unique or plausible way. It's just a device to get two characters together from two different ages and show us how opposites can still attract. Jackman plays an impoverished, unattached nobleman of the nineteenth century; Ryan plays a rising, unattached career woman of the twenty-first century. When their paths cross, you'd think they'd have nothing in common--he a member of the upper classes, breed to luxury in a society where women were largely oppressed; she a member of a liberated feminist generation used to being on equal terms with the men around her. But I suspect the film believes that deep down every man wants to meet a woman who can compete with him on his own level, and every woman wants to be swept off her feet by a gallant gentleman. Or vice versa. I'm not sure which, and I'm not sure the film completely understands the subject, either. In any case, the mismatch is one made in heaven or, more precisely, in Hollywood.
Liev Schreiber costars as Stuart Besser, a present-day fellow who makes the breakthrough in time travel that enable our story to happen. He discovers a crack in the time continuum (sounds impressive; means nothing), a portal to 1876; and all one has to do to turn back the clock is jump off the Brooklyn Bridge at a certain place at a certain hour. I kid you not. Keep saying to yourself, "It's only a romantic comedy. It's only a romantic comedy." With this in mind, the movie works surprisingly well. Besser goes back to a period when Jackman, as Leopold Alexis Elija Graves Walker Thomas Mountbatten, the Third Duke of Albany, is visiting New York City to find a rich wife. Leopold is a most pragmatic individual, a hardened realist who, he says, has never felt love. Furthermore, he'd rather be an inventor than a member of the ruling class; as his uncle explains it, he was "born into privilege but perversely ashamed of it." When Besser returns to the present, Leopold inadvertently returns with him.
Ms. Ryan plays Kate McKay, an executive with a market research firm. Her job is to preview and evaluate products like movies, cheese spreads, and commercials before they're released. Paralleling Leopold, she's practical and objective. Besser is her ex-boyfriend and lives in the apartment above her; she has just broken up with him because she saw their partnership going nowhere. Needless to say, she finds Leopold, with his highborn, gentlemanly deportment, impeccable manners, and fine British accent irresistible. Of course, it takes her most of the movie to recognize that he's really from the past. She just thinks he's an actor and puts him into a diet-spread commercial. But she finds his aristocratic ways charm the bejabbers out of her, and he finds her self-reliance enchantingly refreshing. It also helps that he's handsome and she's beautiful, or their relationship might never have gotten off the ground.
I thought the opening scenes rather slow and banal, the introduction to the time-travel maneuver and the lengthy exposition of characters time consuming. We have to wait impatiently through Leopold's inevitable fumbling with the TV and stereo remotes, with modern aerosol shaving-cream cans, and with NYC's pooper-scooper laws before anything of any consequence occurs. He's a stranger in a strange land, to be sure, but we've seen his kind of mystification and surprise with modernism before. When the blossoming romance finally clicks into place (and an obnoxious dog belonging to Besser disappears), the movie picks up considerably, especially in a scene where Leopold jumps on a horse and rides through Central Park to rescue milady's handbag from a thieving knave. It doesn't help, unfortunately, that to get our pair of lovers together, the script writers have to remove Besser from the scene by making him fall down an elevator shaft and winding up in the hospital. I kid you not. Keep saying, "It's only a romantic comedy; it's only a romantic...."
Average user rating (1-5):
[release]9926[/release]