Sophie persuades Claire to let her come on the search. There are hundreds of men named Lorenzo in Italy, but Claire is undeterred. Claire left Lorenzo in Italy 50 years earlier, and finding him now will be a challenge. To Charlie’s dismay, Sophie has inspired Claire to search for her long-lost love, Lorenzo. She writes to the author of the letter, Claire (Vanessa Redgrave), and is surprised when Claire arrives in Verona with her grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan). While working with the Juliet Club, Sophie discovers a letter written 50 years earlier wedged behind a loose brick. Sophie becomes intrigued with the Juliet Club and begins to help them answer letters. But she finds herself spending a lot of time alone as Victor pursues his business contacts. Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) travels to Verona with her fiancé, Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal), on what she hopes will be a romantic early honeymoon. Most of these letters are answered by the secretaries of ‘Juliet’, a voluntary organisation and part of the Juliet Club. They leave letters to Juliet in the wall beneath the balcony. You end up wishing that Egan and García Bernal had switched roles, and that’s never good.Every year thousands of visitors flock to Verona in Italy to visit the famous Capulet House. He’s a wooden presence here, and there’s much more going on between Seyfried and García Bernal, playing his character as a guy so full of puppy-dog enthusiasm about wine and pasta that he ignores his fiancée. I blame Egan, the Australian actor last seen working an American accent in the short-lived TV show Kings. The romance between Sophie and Charlie is supposed to drive this thing, but there’s no chemistry between the actors. The unusual concentration of men with that name in one area of Tuscany is the only thing that keeps the main characters together for so long, and it’s a rickety contrivance. Her letter soon brings the wealthy and widowed Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) to Italy along with her disapproving grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan), and they’re all off to find the jilted Lorenzo amid a sea of other Lorenzo Bartolinis. After unearthing a 50-year-old letter from an Englishwoman named Claire expressing regret at not having run off with one Lorenzo Bartolini, Sophie is seized with the urge to answer it herself. The city - the setting of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet - receives thousands of letters every year from women asking Juliet for romantic advice, and Sophie finds the small group of women who answer them, writing as Shakespeare’s character. While traveling to Verona with her restaurateur fiancé (Gael García Bernal), she runs across an intriguing bit of real-life local lore. She plays Sophie, a fact checker for The New Yorker who dreams of writing for the magazine. Letters to Juliet takes her farther down that less interesting path. That’s why I’m afraid her career is threatening to become too Light. It’s a measure of Seyfried’s range that her body of work encompasses those films as well as Mamma Mia! and Dear John, yet if I had to choose between Seyfried Light and Seyfried Dark, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. Much harder to find are actresses who can do that while also flourishing in darker material such as Jennifer’s Body and Chloe. The 24-year-old with the feline eyes and quick smile definitely has the talents to do it, but there’s never been a shortage of actresses who can twinkle. Amanda Seyfried is clearly bidding to become America’s romantic-comedy sweetheart, and I’m afraid that she’ll succeed at it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |