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8/9/2019 It'sAbsolutelyPerfect
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/itsabsolutelyperfect 1/2
It’s Absolutely Perfect for You
Review of “Letters to Juliet”
By Patrick McEvoy-HalstonMay 2010
It is unbecoming of a lady to marry her steward, and so the pseudo-Italian
fiancee, who is expert and fussy-obsessed with all the variant particulars
concerning his “estate” -- his newly opened restaurant -- is to be discarded for a
gentleman who’s only obligation is to show himself good-looking, vital, and
inherently decent and well-mannered -- a proper lord. This is one of the things
you understand while watching “Letters to Juliet,” yet another film which must
be objected to lest we become unable to see reality.
Our lady, Sophie, has gone to Brown, what has apparently become THE
finishing school for ladies in our times, being not so ardent-seeming that it might
coarsen you with too professional a sense of purpose, yet still as established and
esteemed as any of the more prominent ivyies. If you’ve gone to Brown, you may
be the sort who is just not pushy enough to have already scored a career as a
major writer at the New Yorker by the time she’s twenty-two, not brutally driven
enough to have portfolioed herself into the most obvious upmost echelons, like
Harvard or Princeton, but who’s relaxed possession of larger qualities, whose
preference for discreteness, anonymity, quiet grace, makes you EXACTLY what
lords of commercial society need as near to them as possible to suggest their own
timelessness and quality -- certain by divine right, to survive and continue to
prosper, if the time's primary henceforth call is for people to define themselves as
either sacrifice or to-be-satisfied.
She’s gone where Lady Di might have gone to if she was an American, and
her future husband has gone to Oxford -- where all boyish princes who would be
Kings must go. If he’d gone to Cambridge, it would have again made him
REALLY seem invested in doing something for the country by craft or trade --
which would have lowered and coarsened him -- when it is his loftiness -- his
sheer existence -- which most keeps the regression-prone countryside from
devolving into dispersions of the-really-quite-insane, gnarly, garish multitudes.
8/9/2019 It'sAbsolutelyPerfect
http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/itsabsolutelyperfect 2/2
Yes, of course, he’s supposed to be a lawyer devoted to helping the weak, which is
supposed to sound like the lord turning away from expectation and risking being
forgotten about, but which by this time we all REALLY know means he’s perfectly
orthodox -- perfectly “certain,” and safe, given our newly updated standards
concerning how lords are to define themselves.
It isn’t a good thing when being as alive as a sunflower but not a wit more
interesting, can’t make you -- an ostensibly ambitious human being -- the subject
of some ridicule. And yet this might now just be where we are -- in that too many
who can at some level see that these leisured, liberal humanists / gentry, who
ostensibly have the time, quietness, and tutored capacity to range greatly and
uninterruptedly while in this world, are just beautiful script, lines curling up,
down, and on through a plot already known and before them, content to take
pleasure in the variances of sensation they can see ahead and know are coming,
but still very much to be taken pleasure in, because vividness exists primarily in
the rush of what is before you not in the nagging memory of what you once knew,
because they are in-mind to give up the reigns to someone else themselves, and
want no evidence anywhere extant that makes them feel small, feel guilty, for
doing so.
Claire --the grandmother -- could be a problem. Which is why all her
genuine gravitas is summoned but drawn to essential vacancy -- her love of her
life, who she once loved and never --ostensibly rightly -- learned to lose interest
in, is SO MUCH perfect acquisition, perfect object, well-groomed and already,
beautifully-told story, that she serves as unmistakable proof in the pudding, as
General Colin Powell to George Bush, that what is not actually here in the film, IS
actually there, if only you had the capacity to find it.