Rom-com’s charm makes up for its shortcomings
There’s a low-key charm to “Juliet, Naked,” a feeling that everyone making it was in a good mood and wanted the same for the rest of us.
It’s an adaptation of a novel by Nick Hornby, who gave us the divine “Brooklyn,” “High Fidelity” and “About a Boy.” It offers the same combination of dyspeptic humor and regret that men will never love women quite as much as they love their obsessive hobbies.
Some sort of marriage breakdown is always around the corner in Hornby
World, but there’s always championship football for him and a new lad for her, so let’s keep things in proportion.
In “Juliet, Naked,” we revisit those themes in the form of an adult romantic triangle. In a quaint little coastal town on the English Channel, we meet Duncan (Chris O’dowd), a professor of television studies at the local college, where he hands out his learned brochures on slang terms used in “The Wire.”
For more than two decades he has held a fixation on former rock star Tucker Crowe, who hasn’t released an album since the heyday of vinyl and might be dead. Duncan scours the internet in search of trivia about his idol, and studies the lyrics on Crowe’s one released album, “Juliet,” like a Rosetta stone. He connects with Crowe’s small band of online fans to share his conjectures about its hidden meanings. He is, as they say there, as daft as a brush with no bristles.
Annie (Rose Byrne), the aging fanboy’s sweet girlfriend, accepts his eccentricity in a bored, long-suffering way. She has her own niche, managing the town’s seaside museum, preserving its not-sorich heritage of nautical knickknacks. They both put up with being sick to death of each other in a somewhat good-hearted way, as people do.
Duncan is in a tizzy when another recording by Crowe is discovered.
It’s a demo tape for “Juliet” called “Juliet, Naked,” and Duncan considers it an even weightier achievement. Annie thinks it’s rubbish, the sort of disagreement that leads Duncan to sigh, “Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, however unnuanced.” She quietly goes on his Crowe fan site and states her piece, receiving a reply from someone who agrees that it stinks: Tucker Crowe himself, played by Ethan Hawke.
Living in the United States on a trickle of royalties for his small body of work, Crowe is a deadbeat dad to several kids, romantically down on his luck and willing to end his long silence to connect with someone who finally gets it about his inconsequential achievements. He and Annie begin a secret online correspondence, and Act 2 has Duncan more than a little flabbergasted and chagrined to see his idol in his hometown, visiting his partner with a rather amorous attitude.
The film ambles on from there, giving everyone’s bewildering circumstances a good third degree. Annie knows that she’s feeling a strong infatuation, but can’t predict what it will become, since Crowe is a deep piece of work in his own way. Duncan tries to hold his vexation rather than lose a chance to bond with the rock ’n’ roll deity he’s been stalking for years. Crowe tries to balance his minor celebrity privilege with not being a total jerk.
There’s a lot to untangle here. But the strong cast, and its good-natured intentions, helps us overlook the film’s shortcomings in length and pacing.