LETTERS TO JULIET

I didn't know that 5-year-olds could get law degrees, or could rent cars in Italy, or could tell their grandmother that grandma is tired and should go to bed. I also didn't know that 5-year-olds could be played by adult pretty-boy actors that looked like a bland blend Ryan Philippe, Heath Ledger, and Matt Damon. But there you have the main love interest in Letters to Juliet, a 20-something guy who acts like a bratty little snot-nosed prick that should be sent to his room. Oh, and he is the assumed love interest. Unbelievable. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Amanda Seyfried plays the "big, wet-eyed Amanda Seyfried role" of Sophie. Sophie is a nice girl, a hard worker (a fact-checker for the New Yorker!) and an earnest writer and romantic in her free time. She and her fiance Victor (Gael García Bernal, stuck in a one-note performance) are going on a pre-honeymoon to Verona, Italy, which turns out just to be an excuse for Victor to check out food and wine vendors to supply his New York restaurant. Alas, so much for romance.

Sophie is left wandering alone in the city of love, and stumbles upon a small courtyard with a balcony, where weeping women scrawl confessional letters and tuck them between the bricks of the wall, hoping for love advice from Juliet herself (ahhhh... swoon!). But what happens to the letters, that are collected by a lovely Italian woman with a basket? Turns out that she is one of the Secretaries of Juliet, and it is the secretaries' job to respond to the letters in Juliet's voice with the best advice she can give. As Sophie finds this out and bonds with the secretaries, she discovers in the bricks a 50-year old letter from an English girl who loved an Italian boy, but fled back to England and was full of regret. Sophie takes a chance and writes back to the address on the letter, and next thing she knows (in seemingly a mere day of movie-time), Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) has returned to Verona to perhaps find her lost love Lorenzo.

Oh, but Claire has her bratty grandson Charlie in tow (see beginning of my review). Of course Sophie wants to help Claire find Lorenzo, which involves driving through lots and lots of glorious Italian countryside. And of course Claire scoops adorable Sophie under her wing as a sort of surrogate mother. But, see the problem is Claire's weirdly over-protective and ridiculously immature grandson Charlie (Christopher Egan). He is introduced as completely insufferable, even though Claire smirks and tells aghast Sophie that he is really not that bad.

See, he is actually a lawyer that helps the little people (Oh, really? Then why does he introduce himself as such an immediate prick? That's charming.), and he has suffered his own personal losses (which makes him an insta-human, I suppose). But, wow. All flashing arrows are pointing to THIS guy as being Sophie's prize? Really? He makes self-absorbed but harmless Victor seem like his own weird Romeo compared to Charlie. But forces of the story are against the reluctant audience (I heard others murmur that they didn't like Charlie) as the predictable plot plays out exactly as you would expect.

But I will say that Letters to Juliet would be completely throwaway if it weren't for the presence of Vanessa Redgrave. She is lovely, warm, wistful, and at times sad. The movie is more of a love story of a woman with her own past, and she manages to convey more in her face than is even evident in the weak script. Letters to Juliet is also a rather sweet love story between an older woman missing her child, and a young woman missing her mother. You *do* want Sophie and Claire to be together as adopted mom and daughter, there's no doubt about that... but it a real crying shame that Sophie has to hook up with Charlie in order to do it.