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Juliet, Naked
***
Dir: Jesse Peretz
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Rose Byrne, Chris O’Dowd
(USA/UK, 15, 1hr 37mins)
About a Boy and High Fidelity are both Nick Hornby adaptations that have worked tremendously well in their transition from page to screen; other adaptations of the rom-com novelist’s works have not fared so well. A Long Way Down anyone?
This falls squarely in the middle, as Hornby’s tale of a music obsessive and a relationship rut entertains occasionally but ultimately ends up a bit…meh.
Annie (Rose Byrne, with a great cut-glass English accent) is trapped in a 15-year relationship with baby-fearing Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), a man who obsesses over cult rocker Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke). Crowe released one amazing album, Juliet, and then vanished.
O’Dowd receives an advance copy of an acoustically stripped-down and re-mastered version of the album and is stratospherically happy, Byrne not so much. She posts a scathing review online, which attracts attention from Crowe himself and through a series of rather unbelievable events the rocker comes to the sleepy seaside village she and O’Dowd live in.
The two find themselves attracted to each other much to O’Dowd’s consternation; he meets his hero but he’s after his girlfriend. There’s plenty in the script about mid-life stagnation and roads less travelled, but it is done with a heavy hand. It’s also packed full of British picture-perfect cliché which grates rather than entertains.
The cast do their best with the material; Byrne in articular is a witty, superior prescence deserving of far better than either of the options offered her in their love triangle. O’Dowd has some funny moments particularly in his dissemination on The Wire TV series but remains too cartoonishly unlikeable whilst Hawke reprises his deadbeat dad persona from Boyhood.
Never quite coming off as funnily as it could, Juliet, Naked is left a little out in the cold.
words Keiron Self
Out now in cinemas