Letters to Juliet

Director: Gary Winick
Cast: Amanda Seyfried, Christopher Egan, Gael Garcia Bernal and Vanessa Redgrave
DVD release: 15 September 2010
Rated: PG

The most innovative thing about Letters to Juliet is the montage of 'lovers’ in art works under the opening titles. There’s a line of dialogue - ‘life is the messy bits’ - and that about sums up the film. It’s a modest romantic escapade, overlong and predictable. You can pick what’s going to happen minutes before it does (case in point - the vine on which Charlie climbs to Sophie simpering on a convenient balcony). You can set your watch on him falling off.

Sophie Hall (Amanda Seyfried), a fact finder and magazine writer, leaves New York with her restaurateur boyfriend Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal) for a pre-honeymoon in Verona. Once there, Victor acts like demented competitor from My Restaurant Rules, carried away by the wonders of the local cuisine and leaving Sophie to her own devices as he swans off to a wine auction in another town. Sophie discovers the courtyard of Juliet Capulet (of Romeo and Juliet fame) where letters are pasted to a wall; left by love-lorn women from around the world.

A small committee of Verona women trouble to answer these letters, and invite Sophie to join them. In due course she discovers a 50 year-old letter left hidden in the wall by Claire Smith who was searching for a young man named Lorenzo who courted her as a teenager. Sophie decides to answer the old letter and to her surprise grandma Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) arrives in Verona with her uppity grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan) to try and locate her long lost love.

The three of them traipse around beautiful Tuscany to check out suitable suspects. Despite many disappointments for Claire, the quest brings Sophie and Charlie closer together, even though initially they’re at loggerheads. What food-befuddled Victor will think of his beloved tootling off the with Brits, whether Claire will eventually find the damned illusive Lorenzo, and whether Sophie and Charlie will actually fall in love, are questions answered at great length.

Director Gary Winick (Bride Wars) makes this a routine assignment without any special flair and doesn’t hurry it along. The romantic leads are lightweight. Amanda Seyfried, the lively young thing in Mamma Mia!, with her Bette Davis eyes and a toothy smile, has had less success since being lined up with lacklustre on-screen lovers as in Dear John. She fares no better this time round with ex-pat from Home and Away, Christopher Egan, doing a buttoned-up, buttock-clenching British bore with a plummy Oxford accent.

Seyfried manages a few effective scenes with the saving grace of the film, Vanessa Redgrave. But there’s scarcely a smidgen of chemistry between her Sophie and the dismal priggish Charlie. Gael Garcia Bernal (The Science of Sleep) exuberantly plays his role as the cuisine-fixated boyfriend, while fine actress Vanessa Redgrave (Atonement) does much to infuse depth into her character and bring emotion to the story despite the superficial script. By happy circumstance, Redgrave reunites with her love of years ago Franco Nero playing Lorenzo - they met in the movie Camelot (1967) so their warm scenes together have a special significance perhaps lost on today’s audiences. Redgrave reports her old romance with Nero was rekindled after working with him again.

Letters To Juliet becomes another predictable stereotyped romantic travelogue which (as Kafka wrote) ‘does no harm, as far as one can tell’. Given a smattering of pleasant and soapy moments, the journey is pedestrian yet may be acceptable entertainment for young female cinema-goers. As an ex-cameraman I have a niggle. With today’s advanced technology, why can’t this film manage to get wide-shots in focus. The glorious Italian landscapes which are a major element in the movie often seemed to lack sharpness.

John Bale