Kate & Leopold (2001)

**½/****
starring Meg Ryan, Hugh Jackman, Liev Schreiber, Breckin Meyer
screenplay by James Mangold and Steven Rogers
directed by James Mangold

by Walter Chaw That the consistently grating Meg Ryan, now milking her second decade as a suspect princess of perk, stars in yet another variation on the When Harry Met Sally, “opposites in love against all odds” scenario augers ill, to be certain. But Kate & Leopold is a decent addition to the beleaguered and overcrowded romantic comedy genre (think Somewhere in Time meets Splash); look for an explanation in James Mangold’s steady direction, the clever, deconstructive screenplay he wrote with Steven Rogers, and a rock-steady performance by Hugh Jackman that is confident and unembarrassed.

Ryan’s New York executive Kate has recently ended a four-year relationship with a dreamer-scientist named Stuart (Liev Schreiber) who, conveniently, lives in the apartment right above hers. Ever the modern woman, attempting to balance her booming career (in advertising, natch) with her ticking biological clock, Kate complains: “You took the best four years of my life.” Unintentionally echoing the audience’s confusion as to how old Kate is actually supposed to seem, Stuart’s response takes the words right out of our collective mouth: “Those were your best?”

We set the stage, however, in 1876 Manhattan: the christening of the Brooklyn Bridge (“And this mighty erection shall stand for all eternity!”), minuet balls, and an arranged marriage for Leopold, Duke of Albany (Jackman), calculated to best pay off his uncle’s royal debts. Leopold resists, his soulful and starry eyes matching Kate’s as they both look off into the middle distance, waxing poetic about the love and freedom from responsibility that is the hallmark of every good Harlequin bodice-ripper. Lucky for them, then, that the intrepid Stuart finds a hole in the space-time continuum through which he journeys, intent on visiting his great-great-great grandfather Leopold. Hijinks ensue, a rather uncomfortable realization that Stuart has just spent the last four years making sweet love to his great-great-great grandmother is discreetly ignored, and Leopold finds himself in Woody Allen and Nora Ephron’s postcard-perfect, jazz-scored Manhattan–primed to pitch some welcome woo in the direction of the adorably irascible Kate.

When it’s revealed that among Kate’s many duties is the task of screening test audiences and suggesting manipulative changes to pump up the mass-appeal of stupid movies, Kate & Leopold demonstrates that it knows exactly which breed of malarkey it is. The film pre-emptively challenges bad reviews by presenting commentary like this in regards to a faux film-within-the-film:

“Well, the female protagonist is unlikable, and let’s swell the Vanessa Williams song at the climax.”

Yet the transparency of this fatigued self-aware, post-modernist Scream tactic barely lessen its effectiveness. For me at least, just an acknowledgement from Kate & Leopold that it was treading the same beaten path as literally dozens of nearly identical films allowed me to overlook its derivativeness and judge the film independent of its confessed predictability.

Kate & Leopold laudably refrains from interrupting its central theme (there are no secondary pairs to lend comic relief or ironic counterpoint–there is little filler). Neither does it dwell on the central gimmick to the point where we begin to worry syllogistic riddles about the paradoxes of time travel. And when a character such as Schreiber’s (or Kate’s spastic brother, played by Breckin Meyer) begins to outwear his welcome, Kate & Leopold seems to know that it’s time to cut back to its titular couple. It’s a stupid film but not a malicious one, and you might be surprised to find as the screen fades to a rapturous black that Kate & Leopold‘s sugary aftertaste is agreeably smooth and nothing like the bitter flavour churning in the wake of its artificial sweetener brothers.

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

James Mangold’s Kate & Leopold, the third holiday release from Miramax to undergo last-minute edits (The Shipping News and In the Bedroom are the two other victims), has been neutered and lobotomized on a snap decision made by Mangold himself. I’m thankful that I saw an unmarred print prior to its impending truncation, for although one of the changes is welcome, another handily excises the main reason that I gave Kate & Leopold a break and mild recommendation in the first place. The original version begins in a test screening, where the marketing executive played by Meg Ryan presides over an early screening of a romantic comedy very much like the one in which she finds herself. After suggesting changes to what she saw that will amp up the saccharine shamelessness of the film within the film, an outraged director confronts her: “My characters are real–movies can be real, you know. You’re sucking the life out of American cinema.” Meg Ryan’s Kate appears as a 19th-century party guest in an early scene in Kate and Leopold. Sharp-eyed viewers spotting her amongst Victorian New York’s glitterati would be able to piece together that the time travel conceit of the film will come full circle. It’s clever, and “clever” being anathema in today’s romantic comedy genre (if ever it held currency), now it’s gone. The abovementioned post-modernist self-awareness was clever as well and earned Kate and Leopold the benefit of the doubt–it’s gone, too. That would be deliciously ironic if it weren’t also so painful to witness. The only welcome elision is the revelation that Liev Schreiber’s ex-boyfriend character Stuart is related to Hugh Jackman’s Leopold, thus sparing us the odd reveal that Stuart has been sleeping with his great-great-great grandmother for the previous two years. Had Mangold decided to examine the Jocasta-Oedipus implications of a bookish young man desiring carnal relations with a distant mother figure, I’d have little ethical complaint, but the plot point seemed a careless misstep and won’t be missed. You are not seeing the version of Kate & Leopold that I’ve reviewed at right. Perhaps not surprisingly, a print of the edited version has not been made available for critical re-evaluation. In this way be forewarned: some other films that arrived in the cineplex without the benefit of a critic’s screening include Texas Rangers, Pootie Tang, and The Wash. To accommodate the last-minute print changes (and to distance it from the sure-bet that is The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring), Kate and Leopold‘s release date has been moved to December 26th from its originally scheduled bow of December 21st.–WC