Hey, everyone. Capone in Chicago here.
The other romance movie of the week feels a bit more like a network Movie of the Week. Although I'm not dismissing the film thanks almost entirely to a exquisite performance by Vanessa Redgrave. But I'm getting ahead of myself. The unnecessary convoluted plot of LETTERS TO JULIET, from director Gary Winick (maker of the fun 13 GOING ON 30 and the unbearable BRIDE WARS), begins in New York City with Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), a fact checker for The New Yorker, mere weeks away from her wedding to chef Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal). Since Victor is on the verge of opening up his own Italian restaurant, they pair decide to take their honeymoon before the wedding and go to Verona, where it just so happens many of Victor's suppliers are based.
Sophie wants to spend the trip being romantic and inseparable, while the energetic Victor wants to visit vineyards and cheese makers and wine auctions to round out the offerings at his restaurant. This leaves Sophie, a frustrated would-be writer, alone in this beautiful city. She's stumbles upon a wall under "Juliet's Balcony," where women with questions about love tack letters addressed to Juliet (as in "Romeo and Juliet," which is set in Verona). It turns out a few of the local ladies take the letters and respond to as many as possible with advice on everything from illness to children to husbands and everything inbetween. Sophie decides to join this circle for a day after she finds a 50-year-old letter hidden behind a brick in the wall from a woman named Claire about man she met and left because her parents would not have approved of their marriage.
Sophie's letter brings the now-65-year-old Claire (Redgrave) and her grown grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan) to Verona to search for Sophie and Claire's lost love Lorenzo. LETTERS TO JULIET lives and breathes real emotion every second Redgrave is on screen. With a simple smile, she can convey more feeling than most actors can flapping their arms around and screaming their words of affection in a rainstorm. She has a warmth in her eyes and a sly wit that does more for this paint-by-number screenplay than it deserves, and they should count their blessings every single day until the end of time that she agreed to be in this movie. There's only so many times I can look at Seyfried's giant eyes and lovely smile before I wonder if there's anything more to her than just being charming. And while Egan certainly is handsome enough, his character's cynicism and abrasive qualities come across as false. I have a tough time believing that seeing his grandmother this happy on the adventure the three end up taking across Italy looking for Lorenzo wouldn't move him to just shut the hell up and support her.
LETTERS TO JULIET wants desperately for us to care about whether Sophie and Charlie fall in love and end up together, but I never cared even a fraction as much about that as I did about Claire's story. It wasn't even close. The only time I even considered getting a little choked up involved scenes highlighting Claire's story. And while Seyfried is a cutey and Egan is as suave as sandpaper, I never got under the surface of their relationship. And this is the key difference between the chemistry-driven JUST WRIGHT and the Redgrave-driven LETTERS TO JULIET. Redgrave emits her own chemistry single handedly, but since there are sections of the film that don't involve her, it's a lesser work. The beautiful Italian landscapes are great, and Redgrave look unbelievably lovely with them framing her, but that only goes so far.
One more thing that essentially sunk the film for me is that the writing is beyond lazy. I'm not talking about the formula stuff; that I can forgive. I'm talking about overused words. Let me put build a drinking game into LETTERS TO JULIET--a movie about a writer who writes a litter and an article about her experience with Claire: any time you hear the word "amazing," take a shot. This word must feel like a dirty slut after being used so often in this film. There are other, similar words that pop up about as many times, but you should have no trouble getting blitzed sticking to "amazing." This word officially has no meaning for me any more because of its overuse in the world, so hearing it repeatedly in this movie nearly suffocated me with banality. While I consider LETTERS TO JULIET a close call thanks entirely to Vanessa Redgrave, I can't quite recommend it because it doesn't try enough to match her remarkable nature.
-- Capone
capone@aintitcool.com
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