Dear Letters to Juliet,
If you’re going to make a safe, standardized, kind-of-boring Hollywood romance, you’ll want to avoid any direct comparisons with William Shakespeare. In setting, staging or dialogue, any vague nod to the bard only serves to remind the viewer not of what we are watching, but what we could be watching and how very far romance has fallen since the late 1500s.
To be fair, Letters to Juliet isn’t so bad. It’s only set in New York for about one-quarter of the film, which is three-quarters less Big Apple time and three-quarters more sun-soaked shots of Italy than most other romantic “comedies” around these days. It’s not offensive or demeaning, and our protagonist Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) doesn’t have to traipse lightly around in three-inch heels for the entire movie.
In fact, Sophie, a fact-checker for the New York Times, switches out her big city heels for chic little gladiator sandals as soon as she lands in Verona — as in “fair Verona, where we lay our scene” — with her fiancé for a pre-wedding honeymoon. It’s a pre-wedding honeymoon because Victor (Gael García Bernal), the fiancé, is opening a restaurant in New York immediately after the nuptials. As such, he’s not so much worried about romance on the trip as he is worried about finding the perfect olive oil supplier. He’s clearly lame. So why are you with him Sophie? Oh right, to create “conflict.”
While Victor smells cheese, Sophie sightsees solo. The big attraction here is Juliet’s alleged courtyard, where the broken-hearted leave notes under Juliet’s balcony asking her for advice. (Like her romance ended well?) There she finds an old note, written 50 years ago, and decides to write back. This prompts the author of the letter, Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), to return to Verona to search for her true love — the love she left waiting in the rain half a century earlier.
Claire’s grandson, Charlie (Christopher Egan), refuses to let her go on this adventure alone, considering all the ways it could end badly. Here we have our leading man, our Romeo to Sophie’s Juliet; except the best speech Egan is given to deliver is something along the lines of “You’re outstanding!” The phrase feels as thin as spider webbing when you’ve just been reminded not 20 minutes ago that in a similar situation, the real Romeo would have laid down a line like, “But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.”
Really, the only issue with this film is that it’s kind of blah. And when you put “blah” next to Shakespeare, it ends up painfully blah.
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