"Juliet, Naked" - Review

"Juliet, Naked" - Review

What do you do when you feel like you’ve wasted your life, either through complacency or living way too fast? When you get older and you realize that you need to get your life sorted out and into better shape, what do you do? Juliet, Naked explores two lonely people looking at their lives and realizing they need to adjust their trajectory.
 
Annie (Rose Byrne) lives in a small town in England. She’s the head of the historical society in a town where not much has happened and not much is currently happening. She longs to have a family and has always played everything safe in her life. Currently, Annie lives with her boyfriend Duncan (Chris O’Dowd) – a college professor who is obsessed with the singer songwriter Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke) an alt ‘90s singer songwriter who has been living off the grid for the past twenty years. Duncan’s so obsessed with Crowe that he runs a fansite for the artist. Annie doesn’t exactly share Duncan’s enthusiasm and has grown to deeply dislike Crowe and his music. One day, Duncan receives a CD in the mail called Juliet, Naked – the unproduced demo of Crowe’s album Juliet. Duncan writes a glowing review of the CD for his website, but Annie has had enough and she posts an extremely negative review in the comment section.
 
The next thing Annie knows, her relationship with Duncan falls apart and at the same time she begins an e-mail correspondence with the actual Tucker Crowe. Turns out, Crowe has given up music and is living in an ex’s garage, taking care of his youngest son Jackson (Azhy Robertson) and dealing with a couple of different exes who all have his children. What follows is an unexpected romance between Annie and Tucker – two people who are both looking at their lives and wondering, just what the hell happened.
 
Juliet, Naked is a hilarious and charming film. What charmed me most about it is the fact that the film loves its characters. Even though they all have moments of being annoying, selfish and stupid, the script by Evgenia Peretz, Jim Taylor and Tamara Jenkins (based on the novel by Nick Hornby) never demonizes them. It treats them like real human beings with flaws and hopes and dreams. It gives the movie a reflective quality whereas a film like this could easily make its characters complete doofuses or become overly sentimental. Similarly, Jesse Peretz’s direction focuses on quieter moments; like when Tucker Crowe performs Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks – it doesn’t feel maudlin or flashy.
 
Rose Byrne is lovely as Annie, bringing her usual heart to the character and is also given moments to flex her comedic chops as well. Byrne shows how it could be possible for her to end up with a guy like Duncan and her frustrations with living with him, and her deep desire to change. Chris O’Dowd is hilarious as Duncan, but instead of playing the character like a buffoon, O’Dowd gives the character a sadness to him that in other hands would be downplayed or overplayed. Ethan Hawke is very good as Tucker Crowe, although this is the type of role he can play in his sleep, but Hawke never phones it in. And his work here is great, bringing a low-key sad dad vibe to his character.
 
Juliet, Naked is a funny and heartwarming film about trying to navigate a second act of your life. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s quiet and reflective, like a favorite acoustic album and sometimes that’s all you need.
 
Three out of Four stars.