A charming, if imaginary custom, provides the excuse for a romantic tour of northern Italy in this bauble of a movie featuring young American Amanda Seyfried and veteran Brit Vanessa Redgrave as impromptu traveling companions. This would be in and around Verona, the town famous as the home of Shakespeare’s equally fictitious, if doomed, lovers. Doom is not the mood here, but the film shares the play’s idealization of true love. The younger woman, as aspiring writer, thinks she has already found hers in her fiancé (Gael Garcia Bernard).
But the older woman’s story is the heart of the romantic drama. Separated from her own young Romeo in 1957, she means to find him again. Only the notion that this long-lost gentleman might be found, might be alive, not decrepit, and single, and might indeed be her one true love can sustain the featherweight plot. And Redgrave, winsome as the starry-eyed but sensible heroine. The heroine has a grandson, too (Chris Egan, in a role that Hugh Grant might have played 20 years ago, had he been doing Hollywood fluff back then). He finds the American vulgar.
As with adaptations of Nicholas Sparks novels, the movie is too busy throwing obstacles in the way of true love than exploring what love actually means. However, if this were based on one of those novels, like Dear John, which starred Seyfried, then most of the screen time would have been devoted to the separation, intervening relationships, and other ornate plot points. Sparks is the Bach of cornball romance novelists. Or maybe the Liberace. But here there are no fancy flashbacks, only backstory. It’s full of romantic comedy trappings—bold gestures, happy coincidences, “cute” misunderstandings, supportive secondary characters—only with less comedy. The first fifteen minutes of the movie, where the writer finds a 50-year-old letter and sets things in motion, is about the only time I wasn’t sure what was going to happen.
Those who think the Sparks adaptation The Notebook was one of the most romantic movies ever will probably enjoy this, but find it a little lightweight by comparison. Those who thought that The Notebook was fake and trite may prefer this movie, which is certainly clichéed, but isn't pretentious.
IMDB link
viewed 4/8/10 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 5/16/10
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