The Invisible Counterpoint

It is unbecoming of a lady to marry her steward, and so the pseudo-Italian fiancee, who is expert and fussy-obsessed with all the variant particulars concerning his “estate” -- his newly opened restaurant -- is to be discarded for a gentleman who’s only obligation is to show himself good-looking, vital, and inherently decent and well-mannered -- a proper lord. This is one of the things you understand while watching “Letters to Juliet,” yet another film which must be objected to lest we become unable to see reality. Our lady, Sophie, has gone to Brown, what has apparently become THE finishing school for ladies in our times, being not so ardent-seeming that it might coarsen you with too professional a sense of purpose, yet still as established and esteemed as any of the more prominent ivyies. If you’ve gone to Brown, you may be the sort who is just not pushy enough to have already scored a career as a major writer at the New Yorker by the time she’s twenty-two, not brutally driven e...

The picture never looks fussed-over or flattened — it breathes, as opposed to just looking merely pretty. Pontecorvo approaches the actresses with the same uncalculated respect. The actors here offer plenty sturdy support for their female counterparts: Bernal’s character is scattered but sympathetic; Egan, deeply unlikable at first, by the end opens himself to the camera in a way you’d never see coming. But the picture really belongs to its two leads. Seyfried gives a wonderfully loose, unstudied performance — nothing she does is forced. And it doesn’t hurt that she has the most gorgeous, enormous eyes in movies today: Not even Disney’s Nine Old Men could have dreamed them up. [. . .] Nero makes his entrance here, Lancelot-style, on a white horse. It’s a touch so perfect, so silly-wonderful, that it’s something of a salve after the almost-too-painful moment that comes immediately before. Redgrave is now 73, but it takes zero imagination to see the face of the young Guenevere in this ol...