LETTERS TO JULIET

The 4:20 show. This drug book argues that the structure of reality is synaptic—matter as thickened thought. So whose mind conjured up theater five (the leaker)? Luckily, the sun shining. Couple in the back row, a woman alone, me, and ten tweens, other side of the aisle, remarkably absorbed except, naturally, when the story gets too intense and they giggle and take pictures of each other with their phones. In their defense, none of the signage in the theater explicitly prohibits flash photography. What’s playing all day is us.

Seyfried (Dear John) is a young, ambitious Brown-grad-cum-fact-checker at The New Yorker (I wish I could italicize it more, but it would fall over). So Oliver Platt is Remnick? And Seyfried eats street pretzels? Off to Verona with fiancée Gael Garcia Bernal, an excitable would-be restaurateur (those guys are all nuts) who offends her by seeking out local ingredients and cooking lore instead of taking her sightseeing. But R & J are saps, too, till they meet and give over. Our heroine finds a bundle of 50-year-old love letters in a niche of Juliet’s wall, which belong to shaky Vanessa Redgrave, who arrives to track down her old flame with sundressed Seyfried in tow, the latter falling in love the while with, stay with me, Redgrave’s prickly grandson. It doesn’t matter. It’s one of Shakespeare’s hardest, actually. Love-talk is an unstable compound, if not an oxymoron outright.

In the late 90s I thought I recognized a growing subgenre of movies interested in coincidence and fate, a seeming weak secular cosmology, tailor-made for the end of history. Now I see more clearly: every movie’s about fate. “Do you believe in destiny?” she asks, on the road through golden Tuscany, unreal fantasy-space that for Americans means: land so old it’s sweet. The old flame is found, he rides up a vineyard path on a stallion, framed by a sky of deepest viagra blue. The last lost love of the Facebook age, just as R & J, texting, would have survived to grow old. It’s not that we don’t believe in destiny—on the contrary, we invent all we can to kill it. Seyfried’s climactic dash for the guy. Yeah: if you’re going to Italy for the Big Declaration, go ahead and rent the Audi, girl, wear the wonderbra. Due cappuccini, per favore. “Grazie, Destino.” And she writes it all down, and then gets it published you-know-where. “Our Far-Flung Correspondents.” Oh, fuck it all…