it's actually not so bad that dreamworks decided to release the love letter at about the same time as star wars episode i : the phantom menace , because this way less people will have to sit through this dreadful little comedy . and no , i really don't feel guilty about wishing this movie death at the box-office . really , i don't . not at all . the plot has been done before -- a mysterious , unaddressed love letter shows up in a small town , causing confusion for everyone who reads it . the center of the ensuing disaster is bookstore owner helen ( kate capshaw , and by the way , what is it with bookstore owner main characters ? in the past year and a half we've seen them in life is beautiful , you've got mail , this movie , and the upcoming notting hill ) , who finds the letter in between couch cushions in the bookstore . she immediately starts testing other people to see who it might be from , and comes to the ( incorrect ) conclusion that the author of the note is a young employee played by tom everett scott . he , reading the letter himself , assumes that she wrote it for him . after a while , they fall in love ( well , duh ) . kate feels guilty about getting in a relationship with someone more than twenty years younger than her , and she also feels guilty because at the same time she is also involved with the town fireman ( tom selleck ) . to add to her turmoil , her mother shows up ( blythe danner , who apparently must have had her daughter when she was about 9 ) and her trusted bookstore manager ( deadpan ellen degeneres ) quits . supporting characters aren't called supporting for nothing . their purpose isn't just to move the plot along , they're also supposed to give the storyline a backbone . to do this , they must exhibit at least marginal depth and must also be interesting . rarely can a movie work if it puts an interesting protagonist in the middle and surrounds her with hackneyed , dull , cardboard secondary characters , especially when at the core of the movie is the protagonist's various interactions with them . this is the love letter's damning error . capshaw's character is as good as i have seen present in recent romantic comedies , but the people that surround her are all either underwritten or purely one-dimensional . because of that , the love letter is awkward and insincere . even worse -- it's a bore . i liked capshaw and her helen , but everyone else is painfully fake , undermining the little drama or sexual tension that has the potential to exist . there is nothing particularly hilarious about all this either -- and besides degeneres' wisecracks , there's little that is even a little amusing . this is not a completely thoughtless film and director peter ho-sun chan does a good job of portraying helen's yearnings and various subtle complexities . but it's far from profound . there isn't a common theme running through the proceedings , thus the movie seems thoughtfully pointless . really , this is a harmless little movie ; it's far from an abomination and it's not torturous to sit through . but bad , it is . awful , it also is . the love letter is a failure , and an inane failure at that . ? 1999 eugene novikov&#137 ;
