BEFORE: Jack Black carries over from "Margot at the Wedding", he's got an uncredited cameo here as a fisherman, but cameos count, too - as long as I spot him in the film, I'll be fine and the chain will remain unbroken.
Tomorrow's line-up for TCM's "31 Days of Oscar" programming moves back, er, forward to showcase the 1960's winners:
6:00 am "Closely Watched Trains" (1967)
8:00 am "The Shop on Main Street" (1965)
10:15 am "Through a Glass Darkly" (1961)
12:00 pm "Z" (1969)
2:15 pm "Two Women" (1960)
4:00 pm "The Facts of Life" (1960)
6:00 pm "Cactus Flower" (1969)
8:00 pm "The Music Man" (1962)
10:15 pm "Oliver!" (1968)
1:30 am "Camelot" (1967)
4:45 am "How the West Was Won" (1962)
Ah, thank God for musicals, maybe I can make up some ground - but I've only seen another five of these, thanks again to that Ingmar Bergman marathon from last January. I've seen "Through a Glass Darkly", plus "Cactus Flower", "The Music Man", "Oliver!" and "Camelot" - I was made to watch most of the classic musicals from the 1960's when I was a kid. Another 5 seen out of these 11 brings my total to 75 seen out of 187, or 40.1%. Back over the hump, and the 1970's are coming around again...
THE PLOT: The life of a provincial town becomes stormy after the appearance of an anonymous love letter.
AFTER: This romance film from the before-times - 1999, to be exact, so pre-Millennium even, maybe hasn't aged all that well. It's too cutesy and charming by half - a relic from a more innocent time, perhaps - pre-pandemic, pre-Trump, even pre-9/11. God, were we ever this naive? Were we so simple that we thought love is the answer to all our problems, literally "All You Need Is Love"? Way back when we weren't worrying about climate change, or the plastic in the ocean, or the imminent collapse of Social Security, and we were only mildly scared senseless by the Y2K bug? Surely President Gore will fix all those other problems, especially the global warming, right? He what? Lost? It was a TIE, and he still lost? And WHO decided the election? That just wasn't right.
I'm getting off track - this film is set in a quaint fictional Massachusetts coastal town (think Gloucester or Rockport or Manchester-by-the-Sea, where this was filmed) that's thrown into romantic chaos by a found letter from one anonymous person to another. What's hard to believe, though, is that over the course of the film, FIVE different people will find this letter, and mistakenly think that this anonymous someone wrote it for THEM - so everyone in this town is love-struck, desperate and quite self-centered, it seems. Who does this? The kind of person who sees an unlabeled Christmas present and just opens it, assuming it must be for them? The kind of person who parks in the handicapped spot, just because it's closer to the mall entrance? Or the kind of person who touches all the candies in the assortment, so nobody else gets any? This doesn't jibe with the quaint New England towns I'm familiar with, where people are, for the most part, quite civil, often charitable and always good-natured. You know, the kind of town that has an independently run bookstore and a general store that sells penny candy. The kind of town where the postman knows everybody, and if a letter is mis-addressed, they know where it's REALLY supposed to go.
Helen is the owner of that independently-run bookstore, and I get it, she's divorced and bitter, and hasn't been in a relationship for quite some time - BUT, there's George, the local fire chief, who took her to prom way back when, then lived in New York City for a while, and he's recently divorced himself, so maybe there's a chance... Ah, but there's this pesky love letter that she finds, mixed in with the mail, and she mistakenly believes it's addressed to her, and came from her younger employee, Johnny. Johnny also finds the letter, not long after that, and mistakenly assumes it's addressed to HIM, and came from Helen. So there's that - and they can't discuss it openly, of course, so they just kind of fall together based on two wrong pretenses, and this keeps Johnny from getting together with Jennifer, who also works at the bookstore, is also athletic like Johnny, and is closer to him in age. It seems like a no-brainer to posit that Johnny and Jennifer might have gotten together, if not for the confusion over the letter.
Then the letter gets found AGAIN, this time by Janet, the assistant manager of the bookstore, and SHE assumes it was addressed to HER, and that it came from George. Even though George never showed romantic interest in her before, but he's generally nice to everyone, so why not him and Janet? Helen's got to break the bad news to Janet that the letter wasn't written for her, and it puts a strain on their friendship. Meanwhile Helen slowly starts to figure out that Johnny didn't write the letter, but by that point they've developed a physical attraction and a full-on relationship is blossoming, so Helen's got to figure out if this is what she really wants, to be in a relationship with this younger man that could keep him from returning to school in the fall and finding his own path. This quaint New England town seems rather hard to leave if you've stayed there too long, apparently.
Meanwhile, Helen's mother and grandmother, who left town a year ago and have been traveling around the world, finally return home, and Helen's mother drops a personal bombshell that's possibly related to the letter. I won't spoil it here, but it's something that would have been much more shocking in 1999 than now, because we're more accepting of certain lifestyles now, you might say they're the law of the land now, thanks to a few court cases. Again, it feels like maybe this film hasn't aged all that well - it was made so long ago that Ellen Degeneres was still playing STRAIGHT women, because, well, what other choice of roles did she have? People just weren't making movies back then with gay women in them, or maybe there were a few indie films that played off this theme, but they were shocking and hard-core and most middle Americans didn't have a handle on the whole lesbian thing yet. Massachusetts, of course, has always been pretty liberal, remember that it was the first state to allow gay marriage, back in 2003 - there's your bit of trivia for the day. (Vermont was the first state to legislate gay marriage a few years later, but Massachusetts was the first to declare it legal based on a court ruling.)
My NITPICK POINT tonight concerns the contents of this letter - if you're going to tell me that one person after another feels something passionate after reading an anonymous letter, man, that better be some letter, like pure poetry. That better be some Emily Dickinson or Elizabeth Barrett Browning material, or something as romantic as a Shakespeare sonnet. But "Did I graze a knee?" or "I think of you when I peel an orange..." Sorry, that just doesn't cut it, I'm not seeing the attractions portrayed developing from those lines. They just don't measure up with "How do I love thee, let me count the ways..." or "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?"
Look, I don't care, if you want to fall in love with a younger man, go for it. If you want to throw yourself at the local fire chief, then by all means, move on that. But let's be realistic, a relationship has a better chance of working out if the two of you have something in common, shared goals, shared experiences, similar likes and dislikes - you don't have to like all the same things, but it helps if you HATE a couple of the same things. Maybe your jobs are similar, and you can talk about that, or sharing town gossip, that's always good - but your relationship just can't be based off on ONE letter that you're not even sure that person really wrote. That's not a solid foundation, it's like built on a house of cards - because when that initial attraction and sense of amazement fades, you'd better have something you share to fall back on, I'm just saying. Almost everything seen here is so darn simplistic that it's also quite unbelievable.
Also starring Kate Capshaw (last seen in "Spielberg"), Blythe Danner (last seen in "I'll See You in My Dreams"), Ellen DeGeneres (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), Julianne Nicholson (last seen in "One True Thing"), Tom Everett Scott (last seen in "The Last Word"), Tom Selleck (last seen in "Quigley Down Under"), Gloria Stuart, Bill Buell (last seen in "The Box"), Alice Drummond (last seen in "Walking and Talking"), Erik Jensen, Geraldine McEwan (last seen in "Vanity Fair"), Margaret Ann Brady, Jessica Capshaw, Patrick Donnelly, with archive footage of Buster Keaton.
RATING: 4 out of 10 books on coping with divorce
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