Four stars. Rated R, for profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 8.31.18
British author/screenwriter Nick Hornby excels at romantic comedies with bite. He’s also one of the few novelists fortunate enough to have his books treated with respect, when they migrate to the big screen.
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| Annie (Rose Byrne) and Duncan (Chris O'Dowd) have lived together for 15 years, but their "togetherness" feels habitual and artificial, rather than being laced with the warmth that comes from mutual love and devotion. |
That’s definitely true of Juliet, Naked, which joins a noteworthy list topped by High Fidelity and About a Boy. Hornby is equally gifted at adapting books by other authors, as evidenced by his accomplished handling of both An Education and Brooklyn. He has an uncanny ear for the fits and starts of relationship dynamics: not merely the way couples interact with each other, but also the manner in which they think and move.
Hornby also has an obvious love of music, and the way it informs key moments in our lives: a subtext readily apparent in Juliet, Naked (which feels, at times, like an Internet-era update of High Fidelity).
Director Jesse Peretz and his three scripters — Evgenia Peretz, Jim Taylor and Tamara Jenkins — have softened some of the rougher edges of Hornby’s novel, but the key narrative elements and underlying moral are firmly in place. The result is droll, wistful, occasionally pungent and often heartwarming.
And messy, the way relationships can be.
Sweet-natured Annie (Rose Byrne), generous of spirit, has never left the small British seaside community of Sandcliff, where she was born. (Filming actually took place in Broadstairs, Kent.) Although once a resort destination, the town has become as faded and unloved as the struggling museum she curates, having inherited that position from her late father.
Annie is equally stuck in a 15-year relationship with boyfriend Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), a film studies professor at a nearby college. Their bond exists more by habit than actual affection; they’re certainly kind to each other, but passion is absent. So is any possibility of children, which Duncan dismissed long ago, and Annie gets little joy from “parenting” her irresponsible adult sister Ros (Lily Brazier), who has woeful taste in lovers.
Duncan’s most annoying habit, however, is his desire to be regarded as the world’s foremost expert on reclusive American singer/songwriter Tucker Crowe, who dropped out of sight years ago, at the height of his fame. To that end, Duncan spends all of his free time maintaining a web site dedicated to the mostly forgotten rocker, where he text-chats with fellow obsessives who scrutinize every line and word of Crowe’s songs, seeking “truth” and “meaning.”
It’s clear that Duncan has long rhapsodized for hours at a time about such minutia — most notably regarding the songs on Crowe’s magnum opus album, Juliet — with Annie as a trapped but tolerant listener. Shoot me now, her expression clearly indicates, but he’s oblivious.
Perhaps as a minor act of revenge, when she opens a parcel and finds a long-lost demo version of Juliet (hence the film’s title), she listens to it while Duncan’s still at work. He’s apoplectic upon arriving home, feeling betrayed because she didn’t let him hear it first; visibly wounded, he luxuriates in the music, and then proclaims it a masterpiece via a review on his web site.
Annie, now seriously nettled, posts her own honest but fairly scornful commentary, regarding the album as not such a much. The relationship battle line has been drawn.
Imagine Annie’s surprise, on top of this, when she receives a text from none other than Tucker Crowe himself, who congratulates her insight: “You got it,” he admits.
Up to this point, during a melancholy but frequently whimsical first act that has focused exclusively on Annie, Duncan and Sandcliff doings, we’ve been led to believe that Crowe is a poetic genius with the soul and insight of, say, Bob Dylan. Peretz abruptly cuts to upstate New York, where a scruffy Tucker (Ethan Hawke) is allowed to live in his ex-girlfriend’s garage, because he has nowhere else to go.
And also because he hopes to compensate for past parenting failures, by helping to raise their 6-year-old son, Jackson (the adorable Azhy Robertson, his expressive face at times shatteringly vulnerable).
It gradually becomes clear — we eavesdrop on an escalating series of texts between Annie and Tucker — that he’s a self-loathing mess who doesn’t think much of his own talent, and has left a trail of neglected children in his wake, from numerous earlier relationships. Whether maturity finally has caught up with him, or whether he’s motivated by his impending 50th birthday, Tucker truly, desperately wants to reverse course.
Trouble is, he hasn’t the faintest idea how to be a father.
Hawke’s performance is key to the film, because — at first blush — we instinctively want to hate this guy: How irresponsible! How self-centered! And yet Hawke makes him so endearingly guilty and regretful, so unassumingly candid about his own failings, so wise in hindsight, that he’s impossible to resist. We want him to make good. Somehow. Despite the steepness of the obvious uphill struggle.
Tucker’s heavy sighs and regretful half-smiles are heartbreaking.
Happily, his bond with Jackson is absolute: warm and mutually devoted. Hawke and Robertson are thoroughly persuasive as father and son, sharing both chemistry and a playful dynamic that hearkens back to the best scenes between Hugh Grant and Nicholas Hoult, in About a Boy.
Tucker’s eldest child Lizzie (Ayoola Smart) visits; burdened by shame, he doesn’t know how to interact with her. The connection he shares with Jackson is absent. Lizzie — who’s pregnant and unmarried — isn’t happy about these circumstances, but she’s not unkind; she invites her father to come to London, when she has the baby. Peretz coaxes a subtle and genuinely touching performance from Smart.
So, London. England. Can’t be that far from Sandcliff. Tucker wonders if Annie would like to meet.
The implications are richly promising, for all sorts of reasons.
Byrne anchors the film with a wholly immersive performance: no small feat, given the wealth of equally well-cast major and minor supporting characters. We quietly grieve for Annie — her life stuck in neutral, having settled for so little — and wonder whether she’s capable of a carpe diem moment. She’s so withdrawn, Byrne holding herself tight, seemingly clad in invisible protective armor.
A night at a local pub with Ros is telling, when Annie can’t even loosen up enough to dance with an enthusiastic fellow. (Rather too enthusiastic, which adds unexpected humor to a potentially melancholy scene.)
O’Dowd can’t help being funny, even under serious circumstances; he sounds funny, particularly when adding a bruised edge to Duncan’s petulance. And O’Dowd is completely believable as an obsessed über-fan, his enthusiasm overtaking any semblance of common sense.
At the same time, Duncan certainly isn’t a villain; he simply isn’t right for Annie.
There’s also a strong message circulating beneath what lurches amusingly into a rather unlikely romantic triangle: the pernicious role the Internet plays, in gathering groups of like-minded obsessives who encourage each other’s flights of fancy and fantasy … to the point that — in this case — Duncan’s imagined sense of Tucker Crowe becomes more “real” than the man himself.
And, with that, comes the arrogance of a worshipper who believes that he knows more about this song, or that poem, than their creator.
I’m reminded of the marvelous scene in Annie Hall, when Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer is stuck in a movie line behind an obnoxious university professor who pontificates about Fellini, Samuel Beckett and Marshall McLuhan, claiming to know everything about them. At which point, Alvy reaches over and drags a hitherto unseen McLuhan into the conversation, who shuts down the guy by saying “You know nothing of my work.” (“Boy,” Allen concludes, breaking the fourth wall to stare at us, “if life were only like this.” No kidding.)
But it’s actually not that simple, as Hornby — and this film’s scripters — understand. We’re each allowed our individual responses to art, even if they’re light years from what the artist intended. Pretty heavy stuff, as this story’s Annie, Duncan, Tucker and the rest circle each other warily and humorously.
On top of which — also always true in a Hornby film adaptation — the music is its own engaging character. The songs on Juliet had to be compelling, to justify Duncan’s fixation on the album; they also had to sound authentic to the 1990s. Original material came from Ryan Adams, Robyn Hitchcock, Conor Mullen Oberst and others, with Hawke supplying his own folk-inflected vocals; those “fabricated” songs are accompanied by period-accurate pop tunes such as The Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket” and Marianne Faithful’s “Come and Stay with Me.”
Juliet, Naked is a quiet delight throughout, all the way up to its note-perfect final scene. I fear it may get lost theatrically, amid the blaring intensity of lingering summer popcorn flicks, but I’m sure it’ll be warmly embraced during a long and happy home video afterlife.
And the soundtrack album can’t help being a hit.
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