An Anonymous Love Letter Has the Whole Town in a Tizzy

In a tiny town in New England, a love letter arrives in a bookstore. It’s addressed to no one and signed from no one. The first woman to see it assumes that it’s for her. Later, the letter passes into other hands, and each reader makes the same assumption, with the result that there’s a lot of love in the air in Loblolly by the Sea. Could unlikely relationships spring from this catalyst? And where did it come from?

This is the premise behind Peter Chan’s The Love Letter, written by Maria Maggenti. Early on, the film makes a visual reference to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the plot reminded me a bit of that, with this letter causing everyone to fall for each other instead of magic potions. Just reading those intense words has a strange effect on each recipient. It makes them feel appreciated and validated. It causes them to look at others in a new light.

I love the cozy setting of the movie. This is a picturesque little village, and cinematographer Tami Reiker consistently brings out its beauty. I often found myself wanting to step right into the screen, whether it showed the sunny streets or the charming bookstore where much of the movie takes place. The dialogue mostly matches up with that innocent small-town feel; there’s scarcely any profanity, though one self-referential slur surfaces and two characters drop an f-bomb, each of which feels totally out of place.

While most of the dialogue is pretty clean, it’s generally not that interesting. The best bits involve lusty, perpetually late bookstore employee Janet (Ellen DeGeneres), who has a tendency to prattle amusingly about inane topics, and quiet, good-natured firefighter George (a sadly mustacheless Tom Selleck), who frequents the shop. DeGeneres and Selleck easily give the most engaging performances in the movie, and their characters feel much more real than the others.

Kate Capshaw, who also produced the movie, is Helen, the emotionally repressed bookstore owner. I know she’s acting detached, but it was the actor as much as the character that felt stiff and uninteresting to me. She spends most of the movie with a bit of a grimace on her face, and at several points, she seems to forget her lines. Her delivery is just off, and it doesn’t help that a lot of her dialogue isn’t very good to begin with.

A similar complaint could be applied to Tom Everett Scott, who made such an adorable lead in That Thing You Do!. Here, as bookstore employee Johnny, he’s still cute, but his personality is less attractive and his performance is often wooden and lacking energy. Julianne Nicholson is a little livelier as Jennifer, the last of the bookstore crew, but there’s an abrasive edge to her that gets wearying after a while.

Other characters come and go, and seemingly insignificant interactions lay the groundwork for the ultimate revelation of who wrote the love letter and why, but the ending still felt somehow tacked-on and unnatural to me. The letter doesn’t get passed around town as much as it could, and after the first reading, in which Helen hears everyone she meets reciting bits of the letter as she tries to figure out who might have written it, the constant repetition of its lines gets tedious. Frankly, it’s really not that thrilling a letter, and anything so generic that anybody in town could think it applies to her or him obviously doesn’t contain a lot of specific personal sentiment.

Ultimately, then, this movie didn’t really deliver for me, in either the romance or the comedy department. There were moments I thought were sweet and moments I thought were funny, but mostly I found it rather dull and clunky. It did make me want to visit New England, and it did serve as a reminder that making assumptions can lead to absurd consequences. But if you write this Letter off, you won’t be missing too much.