Letters to Juliet (2010) ***/*****
Letters to Juliet is a film that wears its intentions on its sleeve. The opening credits are set on top of a montage of famous images of people kissing; there is little attempt at masking that this is anything other than the dreaded chick flick. Despite this, it seemed like there could have been room for the film to impress a larger audience than just girls looking to cry into their popcorn. It was set amongst the beautiful backdrop of Italy, it had a hyped performance by a veteran actress in Vanessa Redgrave, it had indie film darling Gael Garcia Bernal, and it was hitched to the rising star power of Mamma Mia’s principle actress Amanda Seyfried. Odds are that there had to be something in there to impress, right? Well, turns out not really, but I can’t say that Letters to Juliet is a totally unpleasant experience.
Things start out with a young fact checker/aspiring writer for The New Yorker named Sophie (Seyfried) getting ready to leave on a sort of pre-Honeymoon with her chef fiancé Victor (Bernal). If things just went along hunky dory for the two we wouldn’t have much of a movie, so of course they run into complications. Unbeknownst to Sophie, Victor intends on treating their trip much more as a fact finding mission than a romantic getaway, as he wants to spend all of their time testing out food vendors for the posh Italian restaurant that he’s opening in New York. After a couple days of this nonsense, Sophie finally ventures off on her own to do some sight seeing and ends up running afoul of hijinx at the supposed house of Romeo and Juliet’s titular character Juliet Capulet. Now, stay with me here, apparently there is a tradition that lovesick young women will write letters to Juliet asking for her romantic advice and stick them to the wall of the house. Juliet, not quite capable of answering the letters herself due to being both fictional and dead, has employed a cadre of secretaries to collect the letters and do the answering for her. When Sophie falls in with these ladies she finds a 50 year-old letter buried, inexplicably, behind a loose brick. The letter was written by an English woman named Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), and expresses her deep regret at abandoning her first young love Lorenzo. Undaunted at the age of the letter Sophie decides to reply, and undaunted by the impossibility of the situation Claire receives the letter and tracks Sophie down less than a week later. She’s got her grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan) in tow, and she’s all inspired to search the countryside for her lost Lorenzo. Intrigued at the journalistic possibilities of such a search, Sophie volunteers to help. Looks like this is going to be a pretty long vacation!
I don’t think that it’s going to be much of an issue with most people, but let’s get the matter of spoilers out of the way. My previous, lengthy paragraph of summary pretty much only gives away the setup of the film, and to discuss the film further all but requires giving some of its developments away. Fortunately, every development this film has to offer is a cliché of some sort that I’m sure you will see coming a mile away, so I’ll cleanse myself of guilt by taking solace in that fact. Regardless, if you for some reason are intent on going into Letters to Juliet completely fresh, recommendation to avoid reading further. Any sort of romantic comedy wouldn’t be worth its salt unless there was a good, old-fashioned love triangle involved, and this one is no different. Letters to Juliet hangs its story on two running subplots, that of Claire’s search for Lorenzo, and that of Sophie’s confusion about the growing rift between her and Victor, and the growing closeness between her and Charlie. If both of these stories had managed to please, then Letters to Juliet would be an easy recommendation. Unfortunately, that is not the case. While I found everything about Redgrave’s character, her search, and her growing friendship with Sophie sweet, cute, and well done, the complete opposite can be said of the other half of the film. Overdone, badly constructed, and just plain stupid, the romantic entanglement that Sophie finds herself in just does not work.
Before I go off on a tangent about all of the things that I didn’t like and sound like a typical, grumpy old critic, I’ll spend a minute here speaking to the things that I did like. If there is any reason to go see this film at all, they’re named Amanda Seyfried and Vanessa Redgrave. Seyfried is an absolute angel and the bright shining center of this film. She has a rare quality that allows her to be liked by both men and women. Charming, warm, and open, she exudes a vulnerability that makes you just want to reach into the screen and hug her. She impressed me in Mean Girls showing some real comedic chops and playing the stupid character more self aware and subtle than most do, and although I haven’t seen anything that she’s done between that and this other than her unfortunate role in the putrid Jennifer’s Body, after Letters to Juliet I fully intend on going back and giving some of her more recent films a look.
In addition to all that, Vanessa Redgrave is able to give a much younger Amanda Seyfried a run for her money when it comes to light and energy in the eyes. Her Claire is, at the same time, fun, spontaneous, and intrinsically wise. She gives great exasperated shrug and even better knowing sigh. Her performance is truly a veteran one while still feeling energetic and fun. She breathes added life into a character that probably didn’t look like much on the page. She elevates the blank slate given to her and creates a living, breathing person. I had heard that she was the best part of this film going in, and while I think that Seyfried’s performance might have words with that, I’m not going to argue. And if Seyfried is going to develop into a big star in the upcoming years, I can’t think of a better way for her to prepare than to continue to do films with seasoned actresses like Meryl Streep and Vanessa Redgrave. The half of the film centering on Redgrave works. Her quest for lost love is what rings true and it’s largely due to the fact that it’s constructed of well-acted scenes shared by her and Seyfried.
The half of the story centering on Seyfried’s love life, on the other hand, is everything wrong with romantic comedies. Perhaps the central failure of the subplot is the complete dud status of her two suitors. Bernal, who has been strong in everything I’ve seen him in prior to this, is absolutely abysmal as Sophie’s fiancé. His performance is jittery and obnoxious, flat out annoying. Not only is he not believable as the love of Sophie’s life, it’s hard to conceive of anyone being able to stand being in a room with him for more than five minutes without strangling him. If he had been more complex, more likable, the film as a whole could have been elevated beyond the paint by numbers romantic comedy plot that every one of these types of films follows. As presented, Victor is an egomaniac. He’s completely wrapped up in his own food obsessions, completely ignorant of his fiancés feelings, and at no point are we conflicted as to whether or not she should leave him. Such a simply constructed love triangle could have been cathartic, then, if the Charlie character that wanders into her life turned out to be her perfect match. Charlie is an insufferable prick. His introduction into the film is immediately implausible and annoying. He shows up in Verona looking for Sophie, finds her instantly without any difficulty, and instantly starts an adversarial relationship with her. He isn’t on the screen for more than a second before you know that their characters are meant to go from hating each other to loving each other. Plus, he flat out creeped me out by looking like a bizarre “if they mated” mash up of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. If the two of them had a mad scientist combine their genes and then had the offspring raised by a snooty, British cartoon character, then you would have the character of Charlie.
After about an hour of sniping at and hurting each other, Sophie and Charlie are subjected to a “getting to know you” montage as they talk and explore a city. It comes off as a sort of anti Before Sunrise, as that film built its existence around showing two disparate characters growing close in a very relaxed, real way, and this one just lazily skips over all of that and asks you to accept that they are suddenly quite fond of one another. The dialogue is all exposition. There’s no personality or character injected into the conversations, it feels like they’re explaining the story of the film to you rather than having natural exchanges. Towards the end, when they’ve declared their love for one another, you won’t buy it for a second. There was no love at first sight; they hated each other. There was no accelerated bonding due to life or death situations; this film is leisurely at its most intense. The two characters hated each other, had a bunch of fights, learned to tolerate each other at best, and then we’re supposed to be invested in the fact that they’re madly in love with each other? Madly? Really? Really? Can’t they just take a chance on each other instead? Do we really need to overstate things this much just to fit in with what other romantic comedies do?
It’s this sort of overstatement and lack of subtly that ruined what could have been a more interesting film for me. For a film populated by nothing but adults, it often felt like I was watching a story about teen romance. Sophie works for The New Yorker, Victor is a chef good enough to open up his own restaurant in New York, and yet at no point does either of them feel interesting or mature enough for that to be plausible. Sophie begins to fall in love with a new man she’s only known for a week, who’s only been nice to her for a day, and instantly she’s thinking about leaving her fiancé for him? Does she make all of her decisions so rashly and irresponsibly? Is that why she’s engaged to an unabashed narcissist like Victor in the first place? The score of the film often further confused me as to who the target audience they were going after was. It was a sort of whimsical nonsense that reminded me of the music from Kindergarten Cop. It seemed much more appropriate for a light comedy about kids flirting on a senior trip than it did a film about broken engagements and regret, and it left me scratching my head at whether I’d stumbled into a film aimed toward chicks or children. Once the trite, teenybopper-pop sounding Taylor Swift song fires up during the big romantic climax the film couldn’t feel more like a mass-produced, mainstream product rather than something that could be considered a piece of art in any respect. In it’s finale, Letters to Juliet goes from a love story with some potential to looking like borderline parody. Once it gets the search for Lorenzo plot thread out of the way it amps up the Romeo and Juliet references in a big way. Instead of using the location and story as a unique jumping off point for an original story, they decide to re-present the most overused homage in film history and build toward a balcony scene. As a matter of fact, before the credits role we get two balcony scenes, and looking at them both in context continues the film’s theme of missed opportunities. The first time a male character finds Sophie on a balcony things don’t work out, and it could have been a very interesting ending. It showed that no matter the amount of idealist talk you engage in about how you just have to go after love no matter what, sometimes there can be very legitimate, very complex reasons why doing so might be a poor or selfish decision. In a film that was actually about adults, this might have been the way things ended; before the Taylor Swift song, before the second balcony scene that completely negates the first and goes for the typical Hollywood wrap up.
And that is what’s disappointing about this film. It could have been a movie both about adults and for adults. It could have found something interesting to say about relationships, but instead it decided to have its characters act like children and tell its story in the most obvious, stupid way possible. There is an underdeveloped subplot about passion in the film. Victor is passionate about cooking and it motivates every decision that he makes. Sophie is passionate about becoming a writer and consequently doesn’t feel much remorse in letting her fiancé go off on his own and have his way so that she can pursue her own desires. If the film had explored this aspect of their characters more deeply it could have said some really interesting things. What is it to have passion? Is it a good thing? Is it destructive? At what point does being passionate about something turn from being a positive, motivating force, and degenerate into a destructive fetishising of your hobbies? Once it destroys your personal relationships, doesn’t something stop being a passion and start being an addiction? Is it possible for two passionate, successful characters to have a healthy relationship? The film never bothers to raise any of these questions, but instead opts to paint Sophie’s fiancé as a completely thoughtless, unlikable character, and then introduce a British guy who doesn’t seem to do much of anything as a less time strapped, quick fix for Sophie. If Victor had been a more redeemable character, and his and Sophie’s goals were just pulling them in different directions, this could have been a more interesting film. If Charlie had been a less self-absorbed git, and was instead honestly a better match for Sophie, we could have had a much more worthwhile, complex story about love, obligation, and morality. Instead we got the same immature, shallow plot that we get in most every other chick flick. If you are a fan of Seyfried or Redgrave and want to see what they’re able to do here, then by all means check this one out. If you are a sucker for any chick flick that hits the theaters and know you’re unlikely to come out of this one displeased, then by all means check it out. But if you want to watch an honestly engaging story about two adults coming together while dissecting love and relationships in a European setting, stay home and watch Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.
