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Kate & Leopold
***
Cinema Releases - April 5, 2002
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12. 121
minutes. Directed by James Mangold. Written by James Mangold, Steven Rogers;
from a story by Rogers. Starring Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber,
Breckin Meyer, Natasha Lyonne, Bradley Whitford, Paxton Whitehead, Spalding
Grey.
"Kate & Leopold" stars Hugh
Jackman as an English duke living in New York City in the late 19th Century,
who, for reasons I need not go into, finds himself taking an unexpected journey
into the early 21st Century and falling in love with a market researcher
played by Meg Ryan.
Time-travel romance. Yes, it's a great concept,
but reflect for a moment on what studio executives will never understand
-- good movies are about feelings, not events. "Kate & Leopold" works
because it supplies its characters with personalities as well as situations.
Jackman is not simply a nobleman from another time, but one with a lack of
satisfaction with his situation and a keen interest in science (he will,
we learn, go on to invent the elevator). Ryan, who has played women unlucky
in love countless times before, appears here as a woman more resigned than
her characters in "Sleepless in Seattle" and "You've Got Mail" -- she doesn't
sigh and wonder if she'll find the man of her dreams, she has simply given
up, and it's making her bitter, impatient and selfish. She has only the faintest
glimmers of what was presumably, once upon a time, a hopeful
spark.
Jackman sees the glimmers. He's a gentleman, and
when he recognises that Ryan is needy, he wants to provide her with the comfort
and support that previous men have been unable to offer. He can see that
Ryan is more deeply felt than she appears, that she deserves to be more than
a cog in the wheel -- there is a wonderful scene in which he interrupts her
at a dinner date to tell her boss, "There are those who would say that a
man courting a woman in his employ is perpetrating nothing more than a serpentine
attempt to turn a lady into a whore."
Apart from the above moment, the Jackman character
tends to have good manners, but "Kate & Leopold" does not go for the
easy route of having a modern gal falling in love with an old-time guy because
she's swept away by his etiquette in the face of contemporary gaucheness.
Indeed Ryan thinks Jackman is weird for the first half of the picture --
she reacts to his decorum with cynical scoffs, and makes like she's about
to call the cops when he announces that he's from the 1800s. When a romance
does develop, it's because Ryan has never been able to rely on anyone before,
and she recognises that Jackman is a good man, willing to devote
himself.
"Kate & Leopold" runs for two full hours,
which is half an hour longer than most romantic comedies have any right to
be, but the running time gives the film the opportunity to let its characters
emerge as human rather than wow us with easy gags. Instead of accepting and
ignoring it, the movie actually deals with Ryan's unsavourily corporate
occupation, as Jackman gets a glimpse of how products are advertised without
thought for consumer welfare, and asks, "Is this what you do, Kate? Promote
pondscum to an unsuspecting public?"
There aren't even any dumb fish-out-of-water jokes;
humour comes from Jackman's bemused curiosity with the speed and nature of
modern conventions, and the way he adapts to them. Look at the scene in which
his eyes marvel at the efficiency of aerosol shaving foam, or the moment
where he rants about the impossibility of toasters... then compare and contrast
them, boys and girls, to the recent "Just Visiting", in which 13th Century
French nobleman arrive in modern-day Chicago, think that they're supposed
to wash their faces in the toilet, and manage to woo modern women simply
by being 'uncomplicated'. "Kate & Leopold" is a romantic comedy of golden
charisma and uncommon intelligence.
COPYRIGHT©
2002 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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