The woman is Theresa Osbourne (Robin Wright Penn), a researcher for the Chicago Tribune, and the letter moves her and her equally lovelorn co-workers to tears. It is, apparently, a letter written by a man that had recently lost his wife and had written the message as some type of bizarre sea catharsis. And you know how chicks eat that stuff up.

Not able to put the memory of the message or the effect of its romantic drivel out of her head, Theresa decides to track down the mystery man. Now, mind you, she only knows a few things about him – he is a horrible typist and he loves to use awful boat metaphors in his work. The newspaper then writes a brief human interest piece on the enigma of a message in a bottle and, after receiving tons of responses, Theresa winds up getting copies of two other letters similar in form and content.

Together with the crack research staff of the Tribune (which resembles something more like an expert FBI forensics team), Theresa tracks down the author of her letters via a tiny stationery store in St. Claire, North Carolina. It seems that after all of these years, the store employee still had the name and address of the guy who bought the letterhead and had no qualms about giving it out. His name is Garret Blake (Kevin Costner), a boat-fixer-upper guy in St. Claire. Theresa is on the next flight to North Carolina.

Her first glimpse of Garret is down on the water as he works on restoring a beautiful schooner. As luck would have it, he is an attractive man with big, strong, blue-collar hands, his only physical defect being thinning hair (in real life, he would have been a Morley Safer lookalike). She feigns interest in the vessel and he invites her to take a little sail with him. Despite the fact that she was raised in a land-locked state, Theresa never gets seasick during the one-hour cruise.

The two spend the next three days together and end up falling in love more quickly (and almost more unbelievably) than Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley in The Naked Gun. Theresa discovers that Garret’s artist wife died after pregnancy complications. Not quite over his monumental loss, Garret hasn’t quite had the heart to disturb any of his late wife’s belongings – their house is somewhat of a living shrine to her memory. Of course, none of this hinders Garret from trying to get into Theresa’s pants lickety-split. At one point, he awkwardly asks "Do you like meat?" What a smooth talker!

Things progress predictably until the final reel, when things take a bit of an unexpected twist and all but the numbest apathetic will have their waterworks turned to full blast. Penn and Costner have little chemistry, but are individually inoffensive – she has great hair and he has tight jeans (this may be a special clause in all of his contracts). Acting-wise, Paul Newman is the only standout as Garret’s crusty old father. He is much more effective as a weathered drunk than last year’s staggeringly hokey gumshoe in Twilight.

The filmmakers are no strangers to the tear-jerking medium – director Luis Mandoki (When a Man Loves a Woman) and writer Gerald DiPego (Phenomenon) etch a moderately light version of The English Patient, with Oscar winner Gabriel Yared providing the score. Based on a novel by Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook), Message is warmly lensed by Caleb Deschanel (Fly Away Home). As a film it’s mediocre, but as a chick flick it’s better than most.

1:50 - for some mild violence, adult language and situations