Letters to Juliet

Each year, thousands of lovelorn women flock to Verona, Italy, the hometown of Shakespeare's Juliet, to solicit romantic advice from the tragic heroine. They deposit their pleading letters on a wall near the balcony where Romeo supposedly made his famous late-night visit and, if they're lucky, receive a reply from one of Juliet's crew of officially appointed ghostwriters known as the Secretaries of Juliet.

In Gary Winnick's Letters to Juliet, young Sophie (the irresistible Amanda Seyfried), while working on a sort of temp assignment with the Secretaries, winds up leading an elderly British widow (Vanessa Redgrave) on a quest to reunite her with the Italian boyfriend she abruptly — and regretfully — jilted nearly 50 years prior. It's a contrived and far-fetched scenario, to be sure, but no more so than your average Hollywood rom-com, and this one at least carries the pleasant side benefit of allowing the filmmakers to set most of the action in picturesque Verona, where Seyfried and Redgrave traverse the countryside on their quixotic endeavour.

The charming mother-daughter dynamic that forms between Seyfried's doe-eyed do-gooder and Redgrave's wistful grandma carries Letters to Juliet, and make its preposterous and unapologetically schmaltzy plot palpable. But their efforts are largely sabotaged by the mediocre men of Juliet, Gael Garcia Bernal (Babel, The Motorcycle Diaries) and Christopher Egan (Eragon, TV's Kings).

The usually terrific Garcia Bernal is really more of a prop than a character in this film. As Seyfried's future ex-fiance, an ADD-addled restaurateur too preoccupied with procuring ingredients for his new menu to tend to his relationship, he replays the same scene, over and over, as if in some sort of Twilight Zone sketch. His intended replacement, played by Egan, is an insufferable twit we're meant to believe is some sort of hot-shot human rights lawyer back in his native England — a detail I wouldn't believe if he held up his law school degree to the camera for us to see.

Equally incredulous is the romantic subplot that develops between him and Seyfried, and when the story shifts to them, the film rapidly loses steam. Male characters will always play second fiddle in a chick flick — even one written and directed by men — but in Letters to Juliet they're almost an afterthought, seemingly tossed in late in the game to bolster the film's appeal to young female moviegoers. In the end, even someone as talented as Seyfried can't effectively sell us on her character's eventual pair-up with Egan's whiny doofus, no matter how loudly the Taylor Swift soundtrack presses her case.

Hollywood.com rated this film 2 1/2 stars.