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I’m a sucker for a romantic comedy, that genre often called “the chick
flick” by less-enlightened males. I admit that there are some I’ve watched
over and over again. Even though I’m perfectly aware that yes, they’re just
movies, I love the tug on the heartstrings (whatever those are—I’ve always
wondered) I get when the right two people end up together in the end (even if
I already knew it was going to happen). And I like Meg Ryan (okay, I admit it—French
Kiss and When Harry Met Sally are two of my favorites in the romantic
comedy genre). So against the counsel of my friends, I rented Kate & Leopold.
But I had a hard time liking it. In fact, it was hard to feel anything about
these characters at all. I have a pretty high tolerance for suspension of disbelief.
After all, I loved Back to the Future, and I’ll even defend Back to
the Future Part II from time to time as a necessary part of the trilogy.
So the time travel thing didn’t bother me. What did bother me was that I couldn’t
believe Kate and Leopold would fall in love.
In case you haven’t seen the movie (and unless you really want to, like I did,
don’t bother), here’s the plot. A New Yorker named Stuart has discovered a crack
in time and traveled back to 1876. A man from that time, Leopold, follows him
back to 2001. Stuart falls into an elevator shaft and ends up in the hospital,
so his ex-girlfriend Kate, a hard-bitten career woman who lives upstairs, shows
him around. She eventually grows to believe he’s from 1876. They also fall in
love.
The problem was that the characters seemed wooden and stereotyped.
Kate didn’t seem the type who would fall in love with Leopold, and although
Leopold seemed a bit more the type of forward-thinker who would fall in love
with Kate, it just didn’t seem terribly likely that they would be the kind of people to end up together. The actors seemed to have a hard time believing their characters too, which never helps.
Although I watched the whole thing and enjoyed parts in a detached sort
of way, I never felt anything happen to my heartstrings. I just wondered at
the end how they would make it together. And then to my friends, who were bound to say “I told you so,” I said, “It was okay.”
