Letters to Juliet has an irresistible premise: in Verona, Italy, at the house Shakespeare’s Juliet is said to have lived, women from around the world leave letters asking for love advice at a wall under the balcony.
The city employs a small group of women (the “secretaries of Juliet”) to answer each one, and when a young American tourist finds a 50-year-old note stuck behind a rock, they urge her to answer it herself. So she does, and she inspires a widowed grandmother to come to Italy and search for the love of her life that she left 50 years ago.
This can’t miss. And it doesn’t. Vanessa Redgrave plays the grandmother, and all the scenes with her and her quest are quite wonderful in that soapy, schmaltzy, teary-eyed Hollywood way.
So where does Letters to Juliet go wrong? Well, the story outlined above, that’s only about 1/2 of the movie. The other half? Yup, formula rom-com: engaged girl meets another boy, they initially hate each other, then realize they love each other, then there’s a misunderstanding and one of them hates the other again, and then it’s all cleared up for the happy ending.
I was in stitches at the end of Juliet, when after completing the Redgrave storyline, the film shifts to the rom-com and tries to cram all those plot points into the final 20 minutes. The filmmakers had a wonderful little story here, and had they stuck with it this could have been a wonderful little film. No, they forcibly inject this bland and impossibly overdone formula into it until Juliet becomes homogenized and disposable.
Amanda Seyfried plays Sophie, the young American girl who finds the letter. She’s a bright, bubbly little ball of energy with something going on beneath those deep, soulful eyes (I especially liked her as the enigma at the heart of Atom Egoyan’s Chloe). There’s not so much going on here, though she brings more conviction to the role than it calls for; the climatic exchange with her fiancé is especially well-handled.
That fiancé is Victor, played by Gael García Bernal; Christopher Egan stars as Charlie, grandson of Claire (Redgrave), who travels along with Sophie and his grandmother as they search for Lorenzo, the true love.
My apologies to Egan (Eragon, Resident Evil: Extinction), but we have a problem here. Bernal is quite possibly the most likable/sympathetic actor I can think of offhand, and here they’ve cast him as the asshole boyfriend?
Victor isn’t even that bad, he just seems a little preoccupied. I was rooting for him here, and by the end his restaurant preoccupation had become far more interesting than the Sophie/Charlie relationship.
Give me more Redgrave and Bernal, I would’ve been happy here. As it is, rom-com fans should eat Letters to Juliet up, and for good reason – you can do far, far worse in this genre. Look no further than director Gary Winick’s previous film, the abominable Bride Wars.
