A midlife love triangle is charming, but only when its female lead gets the depth she deserves.
Women just don’t get music. It’s a tired trope that crops up far too often, from television and film, to music forums and editorials. We are naïve, inexperienced, and tasteless, says the boys’ club. And “senseless” is the woman who would dare challenge any of their beloved artists.
But actually, she’s just fed up. Exhausted by their pedantry and their patronizing remarks, she will do something to shock them: Like writing an honest, scathing review of one of their icons. In Juliet, Naked, that’s exactly what Annie – our protagonist played by the effortless Rose Byrne – decides to do.
Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), her boyfriend of 10-odd-years, is obsessed with a vanished ‘90s rocker by the name of Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke). An insufferable film professor by day (the kind who suggests that you may need to read Greek mythology to understand The Wire,) Duncan retires to his basement each evening, where he’s erected a shrine to Crowe: posters, vinyl, tapes, CDs and photos from Crowe’s personal life mask the walls. It resembles a stalker’s den. Here, Duncan runs a fan site and leads its small following of fellow Croweheads. It becomes glaringly obvious that his pretentious love for the legend runs deeper than his devotion to Annie, who – you guessed it – doesn’t get it the way he wishes she would.
It isn’t quite clear why Annie has put up with this secondary treatment for so long. All we realize is that she has quietly accepted being stunted by all the men in her life: beyond Duncan’s disinterest in her, she is also the forced inheritor of her father’s museum, where she panders to the demands of her town’s mayor. But when a rare Tucker Crowe demo arrives in the mail one day, she breaks her modest mold if only for a moment. She finally speaks her mind, posting a review of the “listless” and “boring” record on Duncan’s fansite. The film’s rising action also marks her most defiant moment— and it’s a shame that this same energy fails to ever resurface.
Instead, Annie’s thinly devised character continues to exist in the shadow of others. Namely, that of Tucker Crowe; though the famed figure is not even all he’s cracked up to be. Some decades after brief stardom, he’s a deadbeat father hoping to finally make things right with his kids— five, to be exact, from four separate mothers. Crowe’s path to redemption is messy: he is wracked with guilt over his own faults as a father, and his attempts to reconcile these mistakes often blow up in his face. His journey, on the other hand, is far from the tidy trajectory that Annie takes for most of the film. Not even their serendipitous meeting and subsequent romance is enough to rattle the stakes.
“I keep thinking at some point there will be a reward for being so sensible,” Annie mentions early in the film. It isn’t clear if Juliet, Naked cares to break this statement or confirm it. Annie’s most “risky” choices feel less like choices and more like a natural course of action— it is as if, even in purported moments of choice, Annie still humbly follows the script life (or, her writers) set for her. It’s uncertain whether this flat arc stemmed from Nick Hornby’s novel from which Juliet, Naked was adapted. But somewhere along the way, writers failed Annie: she arrives at her independence as if she needed the immature men in her life to help her get there.
Release Dates:
August 17, 2018 – Open in select theaters across New York City and Los Angeles.
August 31, 2018 – National Release.
