This essay is a part of Avidly’s “RomCom Superlative” series
“You can’t live a fairy tale,” says market research expert Kate McKay, played by a compressed and deflated Meg Ryan in James Mangold’s 2001 film Kate & Leopold. The movie proves the truth of this statement, if inadvertently, as Kate & Leopold wins the Most Horrifying Happily Ever After Award.
The film begins in 1876. Hugh Jackman, the wide-eyed Leopold, 3rd Duke of Albany, dreams of being an inventor. Alas, he is an impoverished British royal, and rather than pursuing his passions, he’s been forced to come to America to seek a rich bride. When his uncle throws a ball to introduce him to potential heiresses, none of the women interest him. What does catch Leopold’s eye, however, is the strange man he’s seen all over New York City with a small contraption that we, the audience, recognize as a handheld camera. Leopold chases this man from the ball and — whoops! — off the still-incomplete Brooklyn Bridge, where a time portal warps them to 2001. The man, doofy physicist Stuart, played by Liev Schreiber, explains to Leopold that he is in the 21st century and can return to 1876 in a few days’ time. The movie then promptly drops Stuart down an empty elevator shaft in order to (1) remove him from the plot, (2) establish that Leopold is the inventor of the elevator, and (3) place Leopold more directly in the company of Kate, Stuart’s ex-girlfriend who lives in the apartment below.
What follows from here on out is a kind of conventional RomCom absurdity: Leopold’s striking looks and Kate’s career-forward thinking land him a role as the reluctant spokesperson for a diet substitute for butter and earn her the marketing promotion she thinks she’s always wanted. Leopold’s thoughtful gestures meet Kate’s worldly independence, and they fall in love. They know that their feelings are futile, because Leopold must return to his own time while Kate must accept her job promotion. Stuart re-enters the movie in last-minute fashion, however, to reveal that the photos he took at the beginning of the movie show Kate! This pivotal revelation signals that Kate is fated to follow Leopold to 1876, so she does, where she arrives at the ball and the two of them reunite. True love wins! But this is where I have problems.
Time travel narratives and romantic comedies promise us stories of choice — stories that show us what we learn from making choices, whether that’s choosing who we love or choosing among alternative futures. Although RomCom love feels inevitable, that doesn’t mean we don’t want the thrill of choosing it. And it’s Kate & Leopold’s weird handling of choice that makes its ending so upsetting.
Even as an uncritical child of eight, I was appalled when Kate jumps off the Brooklyn Bridge through a time portal that sends her back to 1876. It’s not that I didn’t understand how soulless the corporate ladder was for Kate. It’s not that Leopold wasn’t spectacularly handsome. It’s not that I didn’t see the value of functioning elevators in an already largely inaccessible world. It’s that I also couldn’t fathom giving up the present for the sake of a complicated past that even the film has trouble fully romanticizing.
At eight, small details bothered me: I mean, even deodorant wouldn’t be invented until 1888. Even now that I’m more willing to accept Rom Coms’s unrealistic worldbuilding, Kate’s actions fill me with concerns. Will she live long enough for penicillin to be invented, or will she contract a preventable-in-2001 infection? Sure, it might be fun to live through the Gilded Age, but what about the sinking of the Titanic, or World War I, or the Great Depression?
The historical jump worries me politically and ethically too. It’s one thing to be critical of contemporary capitalism, but a jump back to a time before women could vote hardly seems a feminist solution to the problem. She might not have to girlboss her way through a 9-to-5 anymore, but is marriage before the right to divorce a good trade-off for dealing with her sleazy boss?
That said, in 2023, we know that moving forward through time doesn’t necessarily mean progress. Maybe the darkest lesson of Kate & Leopold’s conclusion is that the present and the past aren’t so different after all.
In my most generous reading of Kate, I agree that there’s a lot to run away from in the modern world. But there’s a deeper reason to my terrified gut reaction to the ending of Kate & Leopold than political anxiety. And it’s not just surface-level frustration with how the movie’s discussion of time travel diffuses narrative tension and creates nagging plot holes. (Although I really have to point this one out: If it is inevitable that Leopold leaps forward in time, seduces Kate, and returns to his own time, and it is inevitable that he invents the elevator, then elevators wouldn’t be breaking down while he’s in the twenty-first century.)
More troubling is how the film’s explanation for time travel creates a miserable sort of determinism. Stuart, by far the most interesting character of the movie due to his discovery of time portals, explains, “All this time, I thought that I had pretzeled fate and that it had to be untwisted. But what I never considered is that the whole thing is a pretzel.” What he means is time is not strictly linear. But this explanation is garbage no matter how many Oscar nominations the movie received (one, for Best Original Song), so he elaborates, while holding a photo taken of Kate in 1876: “I was supposed to go back. He was supposed to come forward. Then he was supposed to go back again, and . . . so was she.” In Stuart’s mind, this is “A beautiful, 4-D pretzel of kismetic inevitability.”
“Beautiful” is not the word that comes to my mind, at least, when considering this inevitability. Stuart’s explanation implies that Kate traveling to 1876 was always meant to be. And that means that neither Kate nor Leopold ultimately has any free will at all.
This takes the original horror I had for the movie and cranks it up to a whole new level: Kate, jumping from 2001 to 1896, is condemned to a state in which she knows what comes next and, Cassandra-like, will always be powerless to stop it. She won’t successfully warn people about the Titanic. She can’t do anything about World War I. Time will march on, already predetermined, no matter the pretzel-like twists in it, and Kate will not be able to change history in a way that makes the twenty-first century, or any era before it, more livable. She is doomed to simply watch the world go by.
Time travel stories and Rom Coms allow us to explore and experiment with how our decisions affect the world around us and lead to various rewards and consequences. 13 Going on 30, the closest time-travel Rom Com analogue to Kate & Leopold, gives Jenna Rink two distinct choices: become the adult version of herself who is a cutthroat magazine editor at the cost of her moral integrity, or become the adult version of herself who accepts who she is and the people who will continue to love her—which includes a charmingly bashful Mark Ruffalo to make the decision easier. Kate & Leopold has no easy decisions because it tells its characters that there are no decisions to make.
We watch movies like Kate & Leopold because we want to experience risk and encounter it bravely — with our full hearts. And there are scenes here that work. No matter how many times I watch this movie, I’m delighted by how moved Leopold is upon seeing the completed Brooklyn Bridge, and when Kate is flustered after reading an apology from Leopold for shaming her boss. These engaging characters, the fantastical circumstances that force them together, and the obstacles they overcome, promise viewers a climactic moment in which they choose each other. The movie’s ending undoes the romance that Kate and Leopold had earned by stating that neither had the freedom to do anything else.
Kate & Leopold is happy with the absence of choice. How do we process this kind of world, one in which we are robbed of decision and must go on living through a history we cannot change? And how could we ever find happiness in it? Kate & Leopold’s answer is true love. But love in this sense feels like a consolation prize in a reality that remains, by the film’s own admission, inevitable.
Monique Laban’s fiction and essays have appeared in The Offing, Catapult, Clarkesworld, and elsewhere. She has received support from Hedgebrook, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop, and the Tin House Summer Workshop. She is a 2023-2024 Center for Fiction Susan Kamil Emerging Writer Fellow. She lives in New York and is stuck firmly in the twenty-first century.