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It’s Absolutely Perfect for You

Review of “Letters to Juliet” 

By Patrick McEvoy-HalstonMay 2010

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

enough to have portfolioed herself into the most obvious upmost echelons, like

Harvard or Princeton, but who’s relaxed possession of larger qualities, whose

preference for discreteness, anonymity, quiet grace, makes you EXACTLY what

lords of commercial society need as near to them as possible to suggest their own

timelessness and quality -- certain by divine right, to survive and continue to

prosper, if the time's primary henceforth call is for people to define themselves as

either sacrifice or to-be-satisfied.

She’s gone where Lady Di might have gone to if she was an American, and

her future husband has gone to Oxford -- where all boyish princes who would be

Kings must go. If he’d gone to Cambridge, it would have again made him

REALLY seem invested in doing something for the country by craft or trade --

 which would have lowered and coarsened him -- when it is his loftiness -- his

sheer existence -- which most keeps the regression-prone countryside from

devolving into dispersions of the-really-quite-insane, gnarly, garish multitudes.

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 Yes, of course, he’s supposed to be a lawyer devoted to helping the weak, which is

supposed to sound like the lord turning away from expectation and risking being

forgotten about, but which by this time we all REALLY know means he’s perfectly 

orthodox -- perfectly “certain,” and safe, given our newly updated standards

concerning how lords are to define themselves.

It isn’t a good thing when being as alive as a sunflower but not a wit more

interesting, can’t make you -- an ostensibly ambitious human being -- the subject

of some ridicule. And yet this might now just be where we are -- in that too many 

 who can at some level see that these leisured, liberal humanists / gentry, who

ostensibly have the time, quietness, and tutored capacity to range greatly and

uninterruptedly while in this world, are just beautiful script, lines curling up,

down, and on through a plot already known and before them, content to take

pleasure in the variances of sensation they can see ahead and know are coming,

 but still very much to be taken pleasure in, because vividness exists primarily in

the rush of what is before you not in the nagging memory of what you once knew,

 because they are in-mind to give up the reigns to someone else themselves, and

 want no evidence anywhere extant that makes them feel small, feel guilty, for

doing so.

Claire --the grandmother -- could be a problem. Which is why all her

genuine gravitas is summoned but drawn to essential vacancy -- her love of her

life, who she once loved and never --ostensibly rightly -- learned to lose interest

in, is SO MUCH perfect acquisition, perfect object, well-groomed and already,

 beautifully-told story, that she serves as unmistakable proof in the pudding, as

General Colin Powell to George Bush, that what is not actually here in the film, IS

actually there, if only you had the capacity to find it.