Review of Letters to Juliet (2010) by Shiira — 12 Aug 2010
At the 1978 Academy Awards ceremony, Vanessa Redgrave did a very punk rock thing; she spoke her mind. While accepting her Best Supporting Actress Oscar for Fred Zimmerman's "Julia", Redgrave, a PLO supporter, referred to the Jewish Defense League as "Zionist hoodlums", in response to the death threats, and the witnessing of herself being burned in effigy outside The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
"Arafat's whore"(as she was called) did not stick to the script. Needless to say, Redgrave was lustily booed by her peers. Three months earlier, as "Julia" was doing solid business in theaters nationwide, fellow Brit Elvis Costello whipped up some civil disobedience of his own, scaring NBC censors when the punk rocker brought "Less Than Zero" to a screeching halt, before ordering the Attractions to start anew with "Radio Radio" on "Saturday Night Live".
But nobody stays irascible forever, as evidenced by Costello's collaborations with artists outside the realm of popular music, most notably, The Brodsky Quartet, the esteemed musicians who backed the former angry young man on "The Juliet Letters", a baroque anti-rock cycle of songs inspired by a Verona professor's answering of letters that were postmarked for the famed Capulet.
Redgrave, as well, in "Letters to Juliet", playing Claire, an old woman searching for a man named Lorenzo, fifty years(incidentally, the same numerical edition of the Oscars that yielded her gold statuette) after forsaking her first love, would seem to have mellowed out, likewise.
Despite Claire's maternal gravitation toward the motherless Sophie(Amanda Seyfried), recipient of a tender hairbrushing and other surrogate mother actions, Redgrave goes rogue on us. In an act of protestation against the film's sentimentalism, the old woman gives a one-finger salute to the whole drippy enterprise, disguised as an itch on her forehead that she scratches with her middle digit during a luncheon among the Secretaries of Juliet.
Does "Letters to Juliet" deserve it. Not really. But how punk.
This review of Letters to Juliet (2010) was written by Shiira on 12 Aug 2010.
Letters to Juliet has generally received positive reviews.
Was this review helpful?
