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Review by Simon Bell |
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DVD SPECIAL FEATURES: Feature commentary with director James Mangold;
Deleted scenes (optional commentary with James Mangold); Starz Encore 'On
The Set'; Still gallery; Costume featurette; Sting 'Until' music video.
"You can't live a fairytale," says the corporate ladder climbing
company exec, around which one half of this tolerably winsome romance is strung
out.
That is, presumably, until an English Duke, too charming even for Jane Austen,
falls out of the 19th Century and lands in your next door neighbour's apartment.
A vehicle for Meg Ryan and Hugh Jackman, as two lovers separated by polar-world
views and an entire century, this film sees our two leads flesh out the roles
of Kate McKay - a true 21st Century woman who likes it straight up, no chaser
- and the impoverished third Duke of Albany, Leopold, a charming bachelor
of the late 1800s accustomed to standing when a woman leaves the table.
While career and social expectations loom, each has grown cynical about the
very notion of falling in love. But stumbling across a time portal off the
south-side of New York's Brooklyn Bridge, Leopold finds himself thrust unexpectedly
into the present day.
It is here (you guessed it) that the potential for an old fashioned affaire
de coeur is ignited. While the fanciful set-up allows for a bit of fun, as
the time travelling Duke tries to marry the customs and styles of Victoriana
with the social behaviour and apparatus of the Digital Age, the gag quotient
is, to coin a Leopold-ism, vexingly low.
Just as Sylvester Stallone was in director James Mangold's Copland, Leopold
is a fish out of water battling against the madness of the Big Apple. But
the best laugh comes when he unwittingly turns on the TV to be greeted with
a surreal scene from the seminal Sixties show, The Prisoner.
Replete with references to Breakfast at Tiffany's and lone violinists playing
aside rooftop candlelit dinners, it's evident Mangold is trying to recapture
the romantic magic of a Howard Hawks or Frank Capra.
While not
managing that feat, the partnership on which the film hinges does work. But
we are talking queen of rom-com Ryan and rising leading man Jackman, after
all.
Affable support comes in the form of Liev Schreiber as the ex-boyfriend and
progressive scientist while Breckin Meyer, formerly of Go and Road Trip, is
likeable as goofy brother Charlie. (There's an amusing play on the modern
dating game when he is advised by Leopold to tell a girl he fancies, that
she has 'made an impression' on him with her 'gracefulness').
Meanwhile production designer Mark Friedberg's impressive Brooklyn Bridge
and Manhattan of the 1870s is a blend of nice CGI and an actual scale recreation
of one of the bridge's bases.
In the end then, as syrup-coated contemporary fables go, you could get worse
than the cute and rather twee Kate and Leopold.
