REVIEW: Letters to Juliet
Letters to Juliet
Rated: PG
Starring: Amanda Seyfried
My rating: 1.5 stars
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Put any two people in a romantic comedy set the shadow of THE Juliet’s balcony in Verona and love has to happen, right?
What if the guy who we’re supposed to love is so loathsome that you wonder how anyone could fall for him? Letters to Juliet tries for force the possibility that you can love a chauvinistic, not-so-charismatic, Neanderthal-like oaf, despite his obvious character flaws.
It’s a bad movie that makes Last Song and Dear John look like Academy Award winners. Why is Amanda Seyfried still writing letters?
She plays Sophie, a fact-checker wannabe journalist. She travels to Verona on a pre-honeymoon with her fiancé, Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal). He’s more interested in buying wine than spending time with Sophie. They go about their honeymoon in separate directions and Sophie discovers a wall under Juliet’s balcony where women and men flock to write letters asking advice. Think “Dear Abby” crossed with the Wailing Wall.
Sophie befriends the women who collect the letters and write back. She offers to help and, on her first collection of course, finds a 50-year-old letter tucked behind a rock from a mystery woman named Claire. It’s about her lost love, Lorenzo.
As the narrative continues its painful lumbering toward something worth watching – at least I hoped it was worth watching – Sophie’s reply finds Claire, who never forgot about Lorenzo after all these years.
She comes back to the wall with her grandson, Charlie (Christopher Egan), in hopes of thanking Sophie. The meeting between Sophie and Charlie is as clichéd as any romantic comedy could be. They hate each other. He hates that she’s bringing all the emotions out in Claire and she hates that he doesn’t believe in true, eternal love.
The natural and logical action is, of course, to go in search of Lorenzo (said with a sigh every time).
You get the idea from here.
I suppose there isn’t much director Gary Winick could do with this, especially since Nicholas Sparks wasn’t involved. Perhaps he could have asked the writers to make Claire have cancer. I mean, we already have the other pieces: Boy, Girl, Old Boy, Old Girl, Preposterous Love. All that’s missing is cancer.
To quote my father, who described this film as succinctly as one can describe it, “The good thing about this film is that Nicholas Sparks wasn’t involved. The bad thing about this film is that Nicholas Sparks wasn’t involved.”
Don’t bother seeing Letters to Juliet. It’s predictable, light on the emotions, longer than it needs to be and slower than it needs to be. None of the characters, save maybe Claire, whose age, you’d think, would prevent this goose chase from occurring, is at all likeable. The narrative is forced and the pieces too perfectly connected.
Good stories need three elements: Antagonist, Protagonist and a conflict. Somehow, Letters to Juliet misses on all there. You just hate everyone and with Taylor Swift belting out “Love Story” during the final act, you hate that you ate all that popcorn which has suddenly found its way back up into your throat. 1.5 stars.
