Sade but true (12/31/01)
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Kate And Leopold. [James Mangold, 2001.]
Geek extraordinaire Liev Schreiber discovers a hole in time [royalties are due, again, to Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam] just off the edge of the East River bridge and, in the course of his trip to 1876, excites the curiosity of impoverished Duke Hugh Jackman; who blows off the homely rich girl to whom he is about to propose and follows the White Rabbit back down the rabbithole to modern New York. There, as per genre convention, he immediately meets and falls for Meg Ryan, a marketing executive who thinks she likes her job and is conveniently between boyfriends. Naturally, he makes an excellent impression because his manners are Victorian, he can ride a horse, and anyway he’s Hugh Jackman. But, after much tedious second-act detail, the call of duty summons him forth into the past; and, of course, she ends up renouncing modern life and going with him. This demonstrates the superiority of Love [and Destiny] to the laws of the spatiotemporal continuum and accidents of time and place and birth; and probably also that Schreiber managed to have an affair with his own great-great grandmother, but let’s not go there.
Modulo one inversion [who follows whom], this is exactly the same as
Cave Girl [David Oliver, 1985], starring Daniel Roebuck and Cindy Ann Thompson [suggesting the revised poster legend “A love affair fifteen years in the remaking”]; and, if you’ve ever seen Ms. Thompson, you can understand why I liked that better. — I kept waiting for the stroke of genius its readers claimed to have discovered in the screenplay, but I guess it must have been postponed until after the conclusion of the closing credits. Perhaps it will appear in the sequel.
____________Notes from the underground (12/22/01)
