Letters to Juliet
Letters to Juliet
By Megan Carroll
Letters to Juliet was as painful for the audience as Romeo’s realization that Juliet was lying cold and dead beside him. The film immediately makes it evident that it is going to bring nothing new to the romantic drama table.
Enter our main character, Sophie (Amanda Seyfried), a fact checker for the New Yorker whose true passion is writing. She and her chef fiancé Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal) are going to Italy for a pre-honeymoon getaway, but her romantic plans are ruined when the trip turns out to be a working visit for her fiancé. Why does such a seemingly wonderful, intelligent girl like Sophie want to be engaged to someone so negligent? Thanks to director Gary Winick, the answer is very apparent, like most of this film. We are supposed to dislike Victor so that we do not find ourselves in a moral quandary when Sophie starts making out with another man half way into the film. I would love to say that the plot deepened, but it didn’t. This movie was as shallow as the kiddy pool and left nothing to the romantic imagination.
On top of being void of story, plot, depth or substance, a bevy of inconsistencies also plagued this film. Sophie spends most of her time alone sightseeing and comes across the house where Juliet Capulet supposedly lived. She watches in awe as numerous people gather to write letters to Juliet about their lost loves. Soon, Sophie notices that a young woman comes along and removes all of the letters. Intrigued, she follows the lady and finds that a group of women called “Juliet’s Secretaries” have taken it upon themselves to write responses to the authors of the letters. Sophie finds a letter and sits down to respond. As this scene is shot the day passes, and each woman in the group finishing her pile of letters and leaves the table. Eventually, the sun sets and for some strange reason Sophie is still there. She is even allowed to close up shop, even though she is some random American that they have only known for a few hours.
So all that time and just two paragraphs? Does she have writer’s block? During the same time period, four elderly women are shown answering piles of letters! What’s wrong with this picture?
This scene then melds into another inconsistency in which we are introduced to Sophie’s true love interest, Charlie (Chris Egan). He talks about her letter and even goes so far as to quote it. Fast forward to when we actually get to hear what took Sophie a day to write and what Charlie felt was so quotable, but as we hear the letter read, Charlie’s quote is nowhere to be found! It seemed that this film needed it’s own fact checker.
To make it even worse, I don’t think the actors even wanted to be there. I have not seen enough of either Amanda Seyfried or Chris Egan to decide whether they are bad actors or just bored, but I do know that there was zero chemistry between the actors in this film.
The only thing that made Letters to Juliet worth watching was the incredibly beautiful shots of the Italian countryside. Other than that, this film was painful in every way imaginable.
