Imperfect Juliet a Beguiling Love Story
Taking a pre-honeymoon in Italy with her budding restaurateur fiancé Victor (Gael García Bernal), New Yorker fact checker Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) discovers a lost letter written to Juliet of Verona while visiting her famous Shakespearean home. After getting permission from the members of the society who answers thousands of such letters each year, the budding writer replies to the 50-year-old message, hoping her words might touch the heart of the original author in at least some small and simple way.
Vanessa Redgrave and Amanda Seyfried in Summit Entertainments' Letters to Juliet
Her missive ends up doing far more than that, however, Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) coming al the way to Verona with her grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan) in hopes of finding her first true love if only to just say hello and see if he remembers her. Sophie is almost beside herself in shock and awe, quickly making friends with the older woman much to the consternation of her rigidly prim and proper familial companion. With Victor off on his own foodie adventures without her, the young bride-to-be joins up with Claire in her quest to find the teenage object of her affections, not realizing the emotional consequences of the journey and the effect it will end up having on her life and career back in New York.
The only thing surprising about director Gary Winick’s Letters to Juliet is just how much I enjoyed the darn thing even though I knew what was going to happen every single step along the way. A serious upgrade from the filmmaker’s disastrous previous effort Bride Wars and much more in tune with prior works 13 Going on 30 and Tadpole, this romantic fairy tale somehow managed to capture my fancy. I was with Sophie’s journey right from the start, Claire’s quest for a fabled lost romance one that held my heart in the palm of its hand making me care about the outcome far more than it arguably had any right to do.
Let me be perfectly clear, we are not talking about perfection here. Jose Rivera (Trade) and Tim Sullivan’s (Jack & Sarah) isn’t rocket science and it certainly doesn’t do anything unexpected. More, Sophie’s relationships with both Victor and Charlie aren’t even remotely believable, and if anyone is expecting to be moved by the young woman’s decisions in regards to both men prepare to be severely disappointed.
And yet this movie managed to win me over and then some. Even though I didn’t care for her interactions with either of the male objects of her affections I did relate to and very much like Sophie as a character all the same. I believed that she would write that letter to Claire. I bought into the fact she’d want to take that journey with her to discover if love can survive half a century of silence. I was moved as the two women began to form a bond of friendship almost mother-daughter like in intensity.
It helps that Seyfried is growing in leaps and bounds as an actress. While not up to the same level as her sensational work in the otherwise highly disappointing Chloe, her ability to hold my attention in this was still quite remarkable. She makes so very much out of so very little, and even when the script scrapes the bottom of the barrel looking for a reason to exist there is something about her performance that kept me fascinated all the way from start to finish.
But the real star here is, unsurprisingly, Redgrave. The woman does virtually no wrong here, it seemingly taking little to no effort on her part to illicit a response from me while I sat in my theatre seat. She shares a pair of priceless moments with Seyfried, not the least of which is a quiet scene where all she does is lovingly brush the younger actress’ hair. The penultimate moments featuring her are beyond sublime, and I’d go into them further but if I did I’d spoil the emotional impact of what it is she is able to convey. Let me just say my eyes were not even close to dry, and even though I still had to endure another five or ten minutes of Sophie and Charlie pointlessness thanks to Redgrave this didn’t bother me in the least bit.
There is no question that if the more youthful romance had been handled with as much care as the rest of the film my qualified happy matinee recommendation would instantly have transformed into an outright rave. This is not the case, however, but as disappointed by the laziness fueling Sophie’s love life as I am I still adored enough of Winick’s latest to be able to somehow gloss over its multitude of flaws. Letters to Juliet is far from perfection, but as a peon to the timeless allure of loves lost and romances that might have been this is one bit of correspondence I would happily read for a second time.
Film Rating: êêê (out of 4)
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