'Letters to Juliet' stamped by listless plot
If you like the generic pop-tune montage that opens "Letters to Juliet," you'll love the second one 30 minutes later.
And the third 36 minutes later.
And the fourth 44 minutes later.
And the fifth 70 minutes later.
And the sixth 75 minutes later.
Gary Winick's romantically listless "Letters to Juliet" squanders an utterly winsome cast in a prefab plot so predictable and gooey that your shoes might just stick to the theater floor.
The adorable Amanda Seyfried plays Sophie, a fact-checker for New Yorker magazine, edited by a curt Oliver Platt. Sophie embarks on a "pre-wedding honeymoon" to Italy with her beau, Spanish chef Victor (the cute and charming Gael Garcia Bernal).
Instantly, we can tell: He's all wrong for her.
Victor is about to open his own New York restaurant. He spends his time in Italy not with the lovely Sophie, but with the suppliers who will furnish the food and wine for his business. Victor can't even get through a conversation with Sophie without taking an urgent phone call.
So, "Letters to Juliet" becomes another one of those rom-coms where everyone but the heroine knows that her current relationship is doomed the moment that she meets the next available hunky guy.
But first, Sophie discovers a group of Italian women who collect love letters stuffed in the crevices of a wall at Juliet Capulet's house in Verona.
The women respond to the letters and dispense Dear Abby-like advice while pretending to be Shakespeare's tragic lover, Juliet.
One day while Victor is gone on another business trip, Sophie finds a letter to Juliet written in 1957. She replies to its then-teenage author, Claire, and urges her to seek out her long-lost love, the handsome Italian man she stood up half a century earlier.
So she does.
Claire, played by a radiant Vanessa Redgrave with a shock of white hair, arrives in Italy accompanied by her grumbling British grandson Charlie, played by Christopher Egan as one, big, stiff upper lip.
Bingo! The next available hunky guy in the movie!
All they have to do now is track down Claire's lost love, Lorenzo Bartolini.
That should be easy. There are 74 Lorenzo Bartolinis in the Verona area alone.
Winick, director of the shrill comedy "Bride Wars," struggles to inject some dramatic zest into "Letters," but he's thwarted by a ploddingly obvious screenplay (from Jose Rivera and Tim Sullivan) riddled with rom-com dialogue such as "I didn't know true love had an expiration date!"
Seyfried and Egan create likable characters, but there's no romantic spark between them, unlike Bernal's obsessive relationship with food, and that becomes the most passionate part of "Letters to Juliet."
Marco Pontecorvo's gorgeous, widescreen camera work makes "Letters" look like a travel commercial for Italy, easily the most visually flattering look at the country since "Under the Tuscan Sun."
But Andrea Guerra's cloying score? It clings to you like a needy relative who constantly begs, "Please, like me. Please!"
<p class="factboxheadblack">"Letters to Juliet"</p>
<p class="News">★★</p>
<p class="News"><b>Starring:</b> Amanda Seyfried, Vanessa Redgrave, Christopher Egan, Gael Garcia Bernal, Oliver Platt</p>
<p class="News"><b>Directed by: </b>Gary Winick</p>
<p class="News"><b>Other:</b> A Summit Entertainment release. Rated PG. 101 minutes</p>
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