Plot

An English Duke from 1876 is inadvertently dragged to modern day New York where he falls for a plucky advertising executive.

Kate and her actor brother live in N.Y. in the 21st Century. Her ex-boyfriend, Stuart, lives above her apartment. Stuart finds a space near the Brooklyn Bridge where there is a gap in time. He goes back to the 19th Century and takes pictures of the place. Leopold -- a man living in the 1870s -- is puzzled by Stuart's tiny camera, follows him back through the gap, and they both ended up in the present day. Leopold is clueless about his new surroundings. He gets help and insight from Charlie who thinks that Leopold is an actor who is always in character. Leopold is a highly intelligent man and tries his best to learn and even improve the modern conveniences that he encounters.—Rosemea D.S. MacPherson

Leopold is an English and broken baron living in New York in the end of the Nineteenth Century. He needs to get married with a rich fiancée to recover his family position from ruin. Kate is a successful businesswoman living also in New York, but in 2001. Due to a time incident, they meet each other in the present days and they fall in love to each other.—Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

Determined to succeed in the male-dominated corporate world, Kate McKay is a modern, 21st-century business executive. On the other hand, Leopold, His Grace the 3rd Duke of Albany, is an effortlessly charming bachelor of the distant late 1800s. As personal aspirations and social pressures are starting to take a toll on both Kate and Leopold's affairs of the heart, somehow, falling in love is out of the question. However, fate has other plans in store for the unsuspecting perfect strangers. When a tear in the space-time continuum transports Leopold to bustling, present-day New York City, two kindred spirits are in for a big surprise. Is there still space in their hectic lives for some good, old-world romance?—Nick Riganas

In 1876, Leopold Alexis Elijah Walker Gareth Thomas Mountbatten, Duke of Albany and future inventor of the elevator, 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, according to deleted scenes) 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 what he thinks is a suicide, falling after him into the portal that brought the man there in the first place.

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.

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 they don'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 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, Kate vanishes into 1876 where Leopold is himself about to announce Miss Tree as his bride. As he opens his mouth to speak, he sees Kate and announces her name, Kate McKay, as his bride.

In the closing scene, they kiss and the camera is drawn outward showing a wall clock depicting 12:15.