The new twist this time is explained by the evil bureaucrat (Alec Baldwin) in one of several lines of dialogue he should have insisted on rewriting: “A nine-year-old has deciphered the most sophisticated cipher system ever known—and he’s autistic!?!” Yes, little Simon (Miko Hughes) looks at a word game in a puzzle magazine, and while the sound track emits quasi-computeristic beeping noises, he figures out the code concealed there, and calls the secret phone number, causing two geeks in a safe room to leap about in dismay.
Agents are dispatched to try to kill the kid and his parents, who live in Chicago. FBI agent Jeffries comes late to the scene, eyeballs the dead parents, immediately intuits it wasn’t really a murder-suicide (“How’s a guy that’s so broke afford a $1,500 handgun?”), and then finds Simon hiding in a crawl space. Putting two and two together (without beeping noises), he deduces that Simon knows a secret, and powerful people want to destroy him.
The movie then descends into formula again, with obligatory scenes in which the police guard is mysteriously pulled off duty in a hospital corridor (see The Godfather), and Jeffries runs down corridors with the kid under his arm while evil agents demonstrate that no marksman, however well trained, can hit anyone important while there’s still an hour to go. (The David Mamet movie The Spanish Prisoner, which is as smart as Mercury Rising is dumb, has the hero ask a markswoman: “What if you had missed?” and supplies her with the perfect answer: “It would be back to the range for me!”)
The movie’s greatest test of credibility comes when Jeffries, object of a citywide manhunt, walks into a restaurant in the Wrigley Building, meets a complete stranger named Stacy (Kim Dickens), and asks her to watch the kid for him while he goes on a quick mission. Of course Stacy agrees, and cooperates again when the agent and the kid turn up at her house in the middle of the night and ask for a safe place to stay. Before long, indeed, she’s blowing off a business trip to Des Moines because, well, what woman wouldn’t instinctively trust an unshaven man in a sweaty T-shirt with an autistic kid under his arm and a gun in his belt—especially if the cops were after him?
What is sad is that the performances by Willis, Dickens, and young Miko Hughes are really pretty good—better than the material deserves. Willis doesn’t overplay or overspeak, which redeems some of the silly material, and Dickens somehow finds a way through the requirements of her role that allows her to sidestep her character’s wildly implausible decisions.
But what happened to Alec Baldwin’s bullshit detector? Better replace those batteries! His character utters speeches that are laughable in any context, especially this one. “You know,” he says, “my wife says my people skills are like my cooking skills—quick and tasteless.” And listen to his silky speech in the rain as he defends his actions.
Here are the two most obvious problems that sentient audiences will have with the plot. (1) Modern encryption cannot be intuitively deciphered, by rainmen or anyone else, without a key. And, (2) if a nine-year-old kid can break your code, don’t kill the kid, kill the programmers.
Message in a Bottle
(Directed by Luis Mandoki; starring Kevin Costner, Paul Newman, Robin Wright Penn; 1999)
Message in a Bottle is a tearjerker that strolls from crisis to crisis. It’s curiously muted, as if it fears that passion would tear its delicate fabric; even the fights are more in sorrow than in anger, and when there’s a fistfight, it doesn’t feel like a real fistfight—it feels more like someone thought the movie needed a fistfight round about then.
The film is about a man and a woman who believe in great true love. The man believes it’s behind him; the woman hopes it’s ahead of her. One of their ideals in life is “to be somebody’s true north.” Right away we know they’re in trouble. You don’t just find true love. You team up with somebody, and build it from the ground up. But Message in a Bottle believes in the kind of love where the romantic music comes first, trembling and sweeping under every scene, and the dialogue is treated like the lyrics.
Yet it is about two likable characters—three, really, since Paul Newman not only steals every scene he’s in, but puts it in the bank and draws interest on it. Robin Wright Penn plays Theresa, a researcher for the Chicago Tribune, who finds a letter in a bottle. It is a heartbreaking love note to “Catherine,” by a man who wants to make amends to his true north.
Theresa, a divorced mother of one, is deeply touched by the message, and shares it with a columnist named Charlie (Robbie Coltrane), who of course lifts it for a column. Theresa feels betrayed. (If she thinks she can show a letter like that to a guy with a deadline and not read about it in tomorrow’s paper, no wonder she’s still a researcher.) The column leads to the discovery of two other letters, on the same stationery. Charlie has the bottle, the cork, the stationery, and the handwriting analyzed, and figures the messages came from the Carolinas. A few calls to gift shops, and they know who bought the stationery.
It’s Garret Blake (Kevin Costner). Theresa is sent out on a mission to do research about him. She meets his father (Newman), and then the man himself, a shipwright who handcrafts beautiful vessels. He takes her for a test sail. The wind is bracing and the chemistry is right. “You eat meat?” he asks her. “Red meat? I make a perfect steak. It’s the best thing I do.” With this kind of build-up, Linda McCartney would have tucked into a T-bone.
Soon it’s time for Theresa to return home (where after she writes one column, the paper promotes her and gives her an office with a window view; at that rate, in six weeks she’ll be using Colonel McCormick’s ancestral commode). Of course she wants him to come and see her—to see how she lives. “Will you come and visit me?” she asks. His reply does not represent the proudest moment of the screenwriter: “You mean, inland?”
Sooner or later he’s going to find out that she found his letter in a bottle and is not simply a beautiful woman who wandered onto his boat. That his secrets are known in those few places where the Tribune is still read. Yes, but it takes a long time, and when his discovery finally comes, the film handles it with a certain tact. It’s not just an explosion about betrayal, but more complicated—partly because of the nature of the third letter. (Spoiler: It’s a bit of a stretch that Garret’s dying wife coincidentally hit on the idea of writing a note in a bottle to him on the same typewriter and stationery he was using, especially since she presumably didn’t know about the first two notes.)
As morose and contrived as the movie is, it has a certain winsome charm, because of the personal warmth of the actors. This is Robin Wright Penn’s breakthrough to a different kind of acting, and she has a personal triumph; she’s been identified with desperate, hard-as-nails characters, but no more. Costner finds the right note of inarticulate pain; he loves, but doesn’t feel he has the right to. Paul Newman handles his role, as Costner’s ex-drunk father, with the relaxed confidence of Michael Jordan shooting free-throws in your driveway. It is good to see all three of them on the screen, in whatever combination, and the movie is right to play down the sex scenes and underline the cuddling and the whispers.