Kate & Leopold Review

James Mangold made this between Girl, Interrupted and Walk the Line, and it plays like a director doing contract work who has stumbled on one real discovery. Hugh Jackman, a year out from his first Wolverine, turns out to be a natural light comedian: courtly without smugness, funny about toasters and elevators, able to play a duke appalled by modern butter without once winking at the camera.

Meg Ryan works in a lower and wearier register than usual, and the mismatch is instructive, because Kate is written as a steel-plated marketing executive and Ryan keeps quietly softening her. The time travel is where the thing collapses. The script waves at the paradox and moves on, and the revelation that Kate is the bride in Leopold's portrait, and therefore her own ex-boyfriend's great-great-grandmother, was trimmed out of theatrical prints because somebody finally noticed what it implied.

That leaves a romance with a hole punched through the middle of its premise. Sting's song Until, which took the film's only Oscar nomination, is doing emotional work the screenplay declines to do for itself. The Brooklyn Bridge finale is lit and cut like a perfume advertisement, all backlight and no vertigo.