Message in a Bottle

(1999)

Kevin Costner goes postal again in Luis Mandoki's adaptation of Nathaniel Sparks's bestseller The Notebook, where Chicago Tribune research assistant Theresa Osborne (Robin Wright Penn) comes across the letter boat repairman Garret Blake (Costner) wrote to his dead wife and cast into the deep. Theresa gets the assignment to track the mystery writer down, and their mating dance is alternately cute and saccharine, even with Paul Newman adding edge and class as Grant's lovable curmudgeon dad.