The Love Letter

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by Keith Phipps March 29, 2002

A movie only for those who find Northern Exposure too nihilistic and lacking in whimsy, The Love Letter stars Kate Capshaw as a lonely single mother who owns a large, heavily employed bookstore in a quaint New England village that apparently does a lot of reading. Coming across an anonymous love letter one day, Capshaw speculates about its author's identity. Could it be hunky college student Tom Everett Scott? How about hunky fireman Tom Selleck? Meanwhile, others, including bookstore manager Ellen Degeneres (who gives the film its few good moments), find the letter, generating instances of mistaken identity and the sort of libidinal chaos you'd find in the comedies of William Shakespeare, if Shakespeare wrote movies designed to appeal to hardened flower-arranging enthusiasts. Maybe there's something in the water of Loblolly By The Sea, the postcard-ready setting of the beautifully photographed The Love Letter, but everyone seems to sleepwalk through this movie. Nothing happens quickly when things happen at all, be it the sub-Veronica's Closet wit of Geraldine McEwan as the unfortunately named Miss Scattergoods or producer-star Kate Capshaw's ineffective attempt to portray an embittered hardass. You can give The Love Letter credit for offering the possibility of forms of love not usually found in Hollywood romances—older woman/younger man, middle-aged woman/middle-aged woman, befreckled tomboy/one of the stars of An American Werewolf In Paris—but you're better off looking for similar convention-defying in films that don't include the ad nauseam recital of the piece of purple prose that gives the film its title.

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