REVIEW: Leading Ladies Lift Lovely Letters to Juliet

But really, isn't formula just another word for a storytelling convention that can work badly or well, depending on how it's approached? There are no new stories, but there are always pleasing and engaging ways of telling the old ones, and Winick -- working from a script by Jose Rivera and Tim Sullivan -- gets it right here. In the course of his career Winick has been responsible for one or two horrors. (The 2009 Bride Wars, the movie featuring those aforementioned Plaza-crazed brides, is one of them.) But with pictures like 13 Going on 30 and Charlotte's Web, he's also proved that working in the Hollywood mainstream doesn't mean you have to check your brain or your sense of craftsmanship at the door.

There are places where Letters to Juliet could use some crisper guidance -- it goes a little soft in the midsection. Then again, the picture's meandering, laid-back nature is itself suitably Italian: There are no madcap mishaps here, no desperate dashes for nonstop yuks. Letters to Juliet features a number of small, luminous touches, visual and otherwise, that indicate a filmmaker who's blessedly awake at the switch: The bubbles in a champagne glass dissolve into stars dotting an inky sky; when Claire tenderly offers to brush Sophie's hair, Winick discreetly pulls the camera back instead of going in for a close-up, giving the moment the understated grace of a Cassatt painting.

And it's simply a pleasure to watch a movie that doesn't look as if it were dug up from the bottom of a litter box. The DP here is Marco Pontecorvo (son of filmmaking great Gillo), and while you could argue that it's hard to mess up a picture shot in the Tuscan countryside, Pontecorvo does more than just point the camera at beautiful scenery. He gives the movie's interiors a luxe, cozy glow; he treats sunlight on stucco or stone as a thing of casual beauty, instead of forcing it into stiff compositions. The picture never looks fussed-over or flattened -- it breathes, as opposed to just looking merely pretty. Pontecorvo approaches the actresses with the same uncalculated respect.

The actors here offer plenty sturdy support for their female counterparts: Bernal's character is scattered but sympathetic; Egan, deeply unlikable at first, by the end opens himself to the camera in a way you'd never see coming. But the picture really belongs to its two leads. Seyfried gives a wonderfully loose, unstudied performance -- nothing she does is forced. And it doesn't hurt that she has the most gorgeous, enormous eyes in movies today: Not even Disney's Nine Old Men could have dreamed them up.

And then there's Redgrave, whose performance here is a rebuke to anyone who might think Letters to Juliet is just a nice little movie for grannies and no one else. Redgrave puts all she's got into something other actors might just toss off or throw away. She's present every moment; this is an actress who doesn't have a second to waste.

Those of you who are supersensitive to spoilers (and who haven't already seen the trailer, which pretty much gives the whole game away) should stop reading here. Redgrave's Claire does find her Lorenzo -- he's played, in a warm, deeply felt performance, by her real-life partner Franco Nero. Redgrave and Nero met while making the 1967 Camelot; they had a child together, separated, and reconnected years later. (They were married in 2006.)

Nero makes his entrance here, Lancelot-style, on a white horse. It's a touch so perfect, so silly-wonderful, that it's something of a salve after the almost-too-painful moment that comes immediately before. Redgrave is now 73, but it takes zero imagination to see the face of the young Guenevere in this older one. She isn't merely beautiful; she's a living assurance that the young people we once were can stay alive inside us, no matter how much we grow and change.

And still, the moment before Claire sees Lorenzo ride up on that horse is devastating. When she realizes she's about to see him at last, she begs Charlie and Sophie to take her away. "He knew me when I was 15 years old, a girl," she says, trying to cover her face with her hands, not out of self-pity, but as if she were trying to hide from herself. "That girl is gone." The terrifying, glorious beauty of the moment is that she's not. And if that's what Redgrave can do in a seemingly throwaway movie, it's time to think more carefully about the movies we cast aside.

Pages: 1 2