Eh, spoilers probably…
I thoroughly enjoyed Juliet, Naked, the movie starring Rose Byrne, Chris O’Dowd, and Ethan Hawke and directed by Jesse Peretz, whose movie Our Idiot Brother is worth your time. I ordered the book from Amazon and haven’t had a chance to read it yet. I’ll get around to it. I haven’t decided how I feel about Nick Hornby (he wrote Juliet, Naked the novel in case that wasn’t clear). I read High Fidelity and How to be Good. I saw About a Boy the movie and I recently found out that the lyrics of one of my favorite songs, which happens to be by William Shatner, were written by Nick Hornby.
Basically I think he writes lad fiction but it’s really good. (And the song, “That’s Me Trying,” is below. It’s both funny and maudlin from an unsympathetic narrator.)
I’ve been thinking about what makes a movie or a book cheesy. I asked this myself with the book A Man Called Ove, which I feel qualifies as cheesy. I was afraid Juliet, Naked would be the same. It’s a romantic comedy. There’s an intelligent woman protagonist with a boyfriend who doesn’t appreciate or deserve her and there’s a charming rock star who enters her life and shakes things up. From the trailer, you know the plot. You could practically write it yourself.
Except you can’t. The movie deviates enough from the tropes to make it interesting.
My next piece in the puzzle of what makes something cheesy is that it sets up these expectations for and then fulfills them with little surprise. Juliet, Naked doesn’t do that.
So, what makes Juliet, Naked different? Honestly? It’s that Tucker Crowe, the washed up rock star character played by Ethan Hawke, is kind of a dirt bag. He wrote one album, had five kids by four different women and is hated by all of them ( or as Annie wisely points out”they’re angry at you, they don’t hate you, there’s a difference”). He lives in the garage behind his latest ex-wife’s house while raising his youngest son because he finally started to try on the fifth one.
So, that charming rock star who’s going to come and save the heroine? He’s not that charming and he can’t really save anyone after having a heart attack as soon as he landed in London (like I said – spoilers).
It revisits a familiar Nick Hornby theme: pop culture obsession. I can identify with someone like Chris O’Dowd’s Duncan who loves the Tucker Crowe album Juliet so obsessively that he has the definitive online resource for it*. His office is decorated in nineties memorabilia, ticket stubs and posters and pictures of Ethan Hawke that are clearly from Reality Bites. He also teaches a university class on The Wire. I get that guy. (There’s a line where a fellow professor says, “I read your blog” and he’s genuinely flattered. So, yeah, I get that guy.)
The only true adult in the movie is Annie and her happiness doesn’t hinge on the affections of a rock star. She has her own true north and she follows it.
There’s a level of complexity to each of the characters that I didn’t see coming, that probably wouldn’t have happened in Juliet, Naked as penned by Nora Ephron – and I love Nora Ephron, RIP.
So, yeah, see it. And listen to the Shatner song above. And if you want to obsess about a little known one-off album, check out Fear of Pop: Volume 1.
