Kate & Leopold

Plot

In 1876, Leopold Alexis Elijah Walker Thomas Gareth
Mountbatten, Duke of Albany, is a stifled dreamer. Strict
Uncle Millard (Paxton Whitehead) has no patience for Leopold's
disrespect for the
monarchy, chastising him and
telling him he must marry a
rich American, as the
Mountbatten family finances
are depleted. His uncle has told him that on his "thirtieth
birthday he had become a
blemish to the family name". The Duke finds Stuart Besser
(Liev Schreiber), an amateur physicist (and descendant of Leopold) perusing his
schematic diagrams and taking
photographs of them. He had
seen him earlier at Roebling's speech about the Brooklyn Bridge.
Leopold follows Stuart and tries to save him from
falling off the unfinished
bridge; only to fall with him
into a temporal portal between
centuries. Leopold awakens in 21st
century New York. He is at first confused and thinks that he
has been kidnapped. Stuart
says that he has created
formulae to forecast portals
in the temporal universe and
that Leopold must stay inside his apartment until the portal
opens again a week later. As
Stuart takes his dog out, he is
injured by falling into the elevator shaft, and is eventually institutionalized
for speaking about his
scientific discovery.
(According to Stuart's books,
Leopold's unintentional time
travel to the 21st century has caused a disruption of all
elevators, him leaving the
19th century before he could
register for a patent.) Leopold is intrigued by the
cynical and ambitious Kate
McKay (Meg Ryan), Stuart's ex- girlfriend, who comes to the
apartment for her Palm Pilot stylus. He observes that she is
a "career woman" and that her
field, market research, is a
fine avocation for a woman and states that he once dated a
librarian from Sussex. Kate dismisses him and demands that
he take Stuart's dog for a
walk. Leopold is overwhelmed
to see that Roebling's bridge
is still standing. Back at the
apartment, he befriends Charlie (Breckin Meyer), Kate's brother and an actor
between gigs, who believes him
to be an actor as well,
steadfast to his character. Kate and Leopold become
romantically involved, as they
dine and tour New York. When shooting begins on the
commercial in which Leopold
has agreed to act, he finds the
product, diet margarine,
disgusting. He cannot
understand how Kate would have him endorse a flawed item
without qualms, and declares
that "when someone is involved
in something entirely without
merit, one withdraws". Echoing
his uncle, Kate says that sometimes one has to do things
one doesn't want to. He chides
her about integrity. She retorts, "I don't have time for
pious speeches from two
hundred year old men who have
not worked a day in their life".
Their dalliance seems at an
end. Stuart escapes from the mental hospital, and sends Leopold back
to his own time.
That night, while Kate is
accepting her promotion at a
company banquet, he and
Charlie are racing to meet her.
Moments before she goes on stage, they arrive and produce
pictures from Stuart's camera
that show her in 1876. Stuart
says that he had thought he
disrupted the spacetime continuum, but actually "the
whole thing is a beautiful 4-D pretzel of kismetic inevitability".
Kate chooses a life with
Leopold over her career, and
the three of them escape to
the Brooklyn Bridge. There,
catching the portal before it
closes at midnight, Kate vanishes into 1876, where
Leopold appears resigned to be
pragmatic, as Kate and his
uncle had advised him, and
marry Miss Tree for her family
fortune; but, just as he is about to announce his
intention to become engaged to
Miss Tree, as he opens his
mouth to speak, he sees Kate
and announces her name, Kate
McKay, as his bride-to-be. In the closing scene, they kiss
and the camera is drawn
outward showing a
grandfather's clock depicting
12:15.