Letters to Juliet (2010)

Letters to Juliet arrives with the placid confidence of a film that has no argument to make and no intention of making one. Amanda Seyfried plays Sophie, a New York fact checker who travels to Verona with a chef fiancé too preoccupied with sourcing ingredients to notice her, and drifts into the cottage industry of volunteers answering the lovelorn missives left in Juliet's courtyard. Vanessa Redgrave appears as Claire, whose 1957 letter sat unanswered for fifty years, and the film sends her, Sophie, and Claire's scowling barrister grandson across the Veneto in search of a man named Lorenzo Bartolini. There are seventy-four of them. That is the complication.

The machinery is antique and entirely unashamed of it. Golden vineyards, rented convertibles, a wedding at dusk, a balcony, a vine. Nothing here lectures, and nothing here asks us to reconsider the arrangement of the world. Sophie has a career and a voice and a reasonable claim on both, and the screenplay grants her a modest agency in pursuing them, though the pursuit ends exactly where romantic comedy has always ended it, at the altar of somebody else's happiness and then her own. The older actress carries the thing on her back and makes the corn sound like verse. The younger one is levelheaded in a way the genre rarely permits.

Two women, decades apart, share a correspondence and a fondness, and this is treated as ordinary human business, which it is. The film is a tourism brochure with a pulse, a sunlit fantasy of Italian vineyards and New York publishing in which nobody is exploited and nothing is critiqued. It wants only to be liked, and it is reasonably likable. I came with a clipboard and found almost nothing to mark. A gentle, unpretentious romance, and I mean that as the clinical observation it is.