Gary Winick's Letters to Juliet is such a gentle romantic comedy that it barely feels like a romantic comedy at all, at least not in the way we currently define the genre. There's no Amy Adams hilariously slipping through the mud in her high heels, no Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey uproariously pretending not to like each other as they traipse around some tropical island in their shorts, no dueling brides catfighting about who's going to have her dream wedding at the Plaza on a specific day. Letters to Juliet also has the distinction of featuring a marvelous performance from the woman who is, in my view, our greatest living actress.
And yet there were very few critics at one of the only New York press screenings of Letters to Juliet, which suggests to me that it's somehow viewed as disposable, a movie not worth bothering with. Their loss. If even half the movies coming out of Hollywood these days, regardless of the genre they fit into, were made with as much care and spirit as Winick and his cast have poured into Letters to Juliet, the current moviegoing landscape would be a much greener, happier place.
The plot of Letters to Juliet is the sort that generally gets the word "formulaic" slapped on it: Amanda Seyfried is Sophie, an aspiring writer who is, for now, toiling away as a fact checker at The New Yorker. (Her boss there, the big cheese, is played by Oliver Platt -- just call him Oliver Plattnick.) Sophie is engaged to be married to Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal), who's preoccupied with the restaurant he's about to open. The two have planned a pre-wedding pre-honeymoon to romantic Verona, Italy. But upon their arrival Victor, busy tasting cheese and buying wines at auction, proceeds to ignore her.
Sightseeing by herself, she makes her way to one of the city's landmarks, a house that might have belonged to Shakespeare's doomed heroine Juliet had she been a real person. To plenty of people, Juliet is real -- visitors, most of them women, pour their hearts out to her in hand-written letters, which they then place along the house's outer wall. At the end of each day the letters are collected and answered by a group of volunteers, Juliet's "secretaries" (played here by a four actresses who twinkle just enough, but not too much, including Luisa Ranieri).
After befriending these women, Sophie makes a discovery that could be the subject of her first big story: Hidden behind a loose brick in the wall, she finds a letter dated 1957, from an English girl who fears she's made a mistake by walking away from her young Italian lover. Sophie responds to the letter, and is astonished when a stuffy young English twerp, Charlie (Christopher Egan), shows up in Verona along with the writer of the letter, his grandmother Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), now a 70-something widow. Claire hopes to reconnect with her lost love, a guy named Lorenzo, and Charlie is none too pleased about it: He doesn't want to see his grandmother hurt or disappointed. Nonetheless, the three find themselves criss-crossing the Tuscan countryside in the hopes that Claire will find her Lorenzo, among the dozens of Lorenzos with the same surname who live in the area. Their search -- and Sophie's gradual realization that Charlie isn't such a dink after all -- constitutes the "formula" of 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.