It’s only rock and roll, but I like it
What fun it is to have heroes who live perfect romantic lives in our imaginations. How satisfying is it to cherry-pick snippets of their lives, served to us on podcasts or through fawning interview pieces, which invite us to a front row seat to learn of their creative process, or the inspirations that led them to their best works, works which come to us like a pristine seashell discovered on a summertime beach.
We willfully crowd-out hazy moments of doubt, when we wonder about what it must have been like to live with, or love, or even just share extended lengths of time with our heroes. It’s too easy to drift lazily back to the film, or the novel, or the album, and back to our mental fanboy scrapbook.
Juliet, Naked, the implausible but devastatingly charming new film from Jesse Peretz, efficiently manages to show us the artist as both outwardly alluring and inwardly shattered, and sketches a portrait that convinces us to have sympathy for how the creative life can leave so much wreckage, and so many casualties, and yet produce compelling beauty and truth.
The film is based on the 2009 Nick Hornby novel of the same name, but it really should be compared to High Fidelity, the 2000 film — also adapted from Hornby’s 1995 novel — which has become a seminal offering in the cinema of both rock and middle-aged male obsession.
We first meet Annie (Rose Byrne), inhabitant of an English seaside town drained of everything interesting except its musty museum and its prized possession of a pickled shark’s eye from the summer of 1964. Annie seems a bit too cute for the place, and grouses extensively about everything, but mostly about her boyfriend Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), a film studies lecturer at the local college, who half heartedly tries to pass off The Wire as Shakespeare to drowsy students.
At home, Duncan’s pulse quickens quite a bit at the mention of Tucker Crowe, a once acclaimed singer-songwriter from the long ago ’90’s who disappeared in a huff at the height of his career. To Duncan and handful of aging internet friends, Skype-fueled where-is-he-now sessions rival attempts to explain the disappearance of Amelia Earhart or Jimmy Hoffa.
Byrne’s Annie exists in that sad space of a woman caught in the web of an unhappy relationship and seemingly diminishing prospects. She shuffles to work in floral-printed sundresses, but she wears a face of constant disappointment. Her once shared Tucker-obsession has soured into resentment, and her relationship with Duncan seems doomed. Instead of couples therapy, the post delivers a solution in the form of a long-lost demo version of Juliet, Crowe’s masterpiece. Doing what any frustrated partner would do, she tears into the jet pak, listens to the CD herself, and posts a scathing review on Duncan’s website. Atta girl!
The screenplay, by Peretz, his sister Evgenia Peretz, and a host of contributors, keeps the mood light, until it asks us to accompany it on a leap of faith: that Tucker Crowe himself, tucked away in his precious anonymity, has read Annie’s review, and chooses to strike up an email conversation with her.
The screenplay does have great fun presenting the internet as a schizophrenic supporting character. It simultaneously harmonizes Duncan and his friends’ teenaged fantasy theories about present-day Crowe, and provides Annie and Tucker ample opportunities to get to know one another via hastily-scribbled messages on mobile phones or moments stolen on a desktop during meetings or lunch. We get both a comedic rebuke of internet echo chamber psychology, and a twenty-first century spin on the nineteenth-century literary device of love letters. Director of photography Remi Adefarasin deftly bridges the gap between the film’s two halves by understanding that we don’t care what text messages or email looks like, just how the characters’ faces react and how their fingers reply, and how the addictive nature of the internet feeds the growing attraction between Annie and Tucker.
At the same time, Adefarasin knows that showing us middle-aged men arranged on a screen arguing about nothing into the late hours, and showing us an overly-designed website as an expression of obsession, is damn funny.
Which leads us to Ethan Hawke’s Tucker, spending the last of his bank account of charm and allure by crashing in the garage of one of his exes, and raising his son Jackson (Azhy Robertson).
Never was there a role better suited to Hawke’s skillful combination of boyishness and sadness. His Tucker is a moral and physical slouch, an aging rocker who still gets by with a voice that knows how to sing on the stage, and how to talk to the ladies, and an approach to life that through the slings and arrows still revels in the beautiful moment, forever mulling on and mining that moment for a nugget of truth. Director Jesse Peretz was the original bass player for the great 90’s band The Lemonheads, and through Hawke’s Crowe, brings his years in music to bear in convincing us that we can still sympathize with someone whose personal life is in utter shambles, but who couldn’t really have lived any other way.
O’Dowd’s Duncan gets the unenviable project of trying and failing to grow beyond his obsessions, but shoulders the burden respectively. Acting more as a cautionary tale than as a supporting character, O’Dowd’s performance is squarely comedic, helping to keep the film’s romantic focus on Tucker and Annie.
Rose Byrne’s task is a bit more difficult: convincing us that Annie, despite her hesitant willingness to accept a small town museum curator’s lonely life, could fall for an aging rock star alcoholic from the USA. The film makes us wait until the very last scene to answer this pressing question, and matches the best of the romantic comedy genre in doing so.
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Juliet, Naked opens today in select Bay Area theaters.
