Letters to Juliet is a lot like Taylor Swift, whose innocuous little ballad “Love Story” plays in the film’s final scenes and in all of its trailers. It’s sweet, inoffensive and you’d be angry if Kanye West drunkenly interrupted it.
The movie centers around Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), a fact-checker at The New Yorker magazine, who dreams of being a writer. She is engaged to Victor (Gael García Bernal), a preoccupied would-be restaurateur. The two decide to go on a pre-honeymoon to Italy before Victor’s restaurant opens, but they have completely different ideas of how to spend their time. Victor wants to visit his suppliers, olive oil vineyards, cheese farms, and wine auctions, while Sophie wants to see something worth writing home about.
She finds the story she’s searching for when she starts hanging out with a group of women who answer letters from the lovelorn that have been tacked to the balcony of Juliet (of star-crossed lovers fame). When Sophie discovers and answers a lost fifty-year-old missive, she ends up meeting its sender, the radiant white-haired Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) and her peevish but handsome grandson, Charlie (Christopher Egan). The three embark on a journey sans Victor across the sun-dappled, cypress-dotted Tuscan countryside to find Claire’s abandoned Italian beau, Lorenzo (Franco Nero). Along the way, Sophie and Charlie find love, too.
You can see the romance coming from a mile away, of course, and not just because Seyfried and Egan are two of the prettiest blonde-haired, blue-eyed people on earth. Although he’s as gorgeous as ever (see Y Tu Mamá También or The Motorcycle Diaries if you’d really like to fall in love), García Bernal plays Victor as such a fast-talking, high-strung, and disposable love interest that you instantly know he doesn’t stand a chance. Even though (or perhaps because) Sophie and Charlie loathe each other on first sight.
No matter. That love story, as penned by Jose Rivera and Tim Sullivan, isn’t the one you should be paying attention to anyway. It includes hokey lines of dialogue like “I didn’t know that true love had an expiration date” that I’d just as soon forget. No, Letters to Juliet is really a love letter to Italy from director Gary Winick and cinematographer Marco Pontecorvo. The rolling green hills, the golden sunsets, and the clear midnight skies are the stars of this film, and you can tell by the way they’re affectionately shot and allowed to linger.
Even Seyfried, a solid actress whose saucer-eyed good looks and charms rescued Dear John (another ode to the epistle) from the trash heap, serves as little more than a three-dimensional Boticelli painting to match Egan’s statue of David impression. That’s not to say that the actor is wooden (or marble, as the case may be) but there isn’t enough conflict present in the script for him to do more than be a curly-haired, squinty-eyed caricature of an uptight snob. It’s a shame, since his performance as the biblical David in the brilliant-but-canceled television series Kings hinted at a far deeper talent.
It’s clear from the PG rating that the film shares a target audience with country-pop crooner Taylor Swift and Colbie Caillat, the soundtrack’s other patron saint. Still, I can’t help but wonder what Letters to Juliet might have looked like had it revolved around Redgrave and Nero, instead. Even without knowing the pair’s long, impressive resumes or their across-the-decades love story (they had a passionate affair on the set of Camelot in 1967, a child in 1969, but only got married in 2006), the intensity of the moment when they first lock eyes in the film trumps 90 minutes of watching their young counterparts dance around one another. Who says that actors with a real-life relationship can’t have onscreen chemistry?
I went into Letters to Juliet as I go into all romantic comedies–hoping to fall in love. I did…with Italy and Vanessa Redgrave. There are worse things.
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love the piccy of her