A rueful dramedy captures the heart of Nick Hornby’s sweet-tart writing.
Based on a typically soulful Nick Hornby novel, Juliet, Naked counterbalances two kinds of life-error, one recognizably masculine and the other just as typically feminine. Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke) is a cult-rock singer-songwriter in America whose selfish irresponsibility has left two countries littered with children he barely knows. Thousands of miles away, in a boring English seaside town, there’s a quiet English lady named Annie (Rose Byrne) who has made the opposite mistake: Selfless with first her dying dad and then her much younger little sister, she has meekly settled into an airless existence with a pop-culture obsessive, Duncan (Chris O’Dowd). He is one of those men who declares he’ll never have children because it’d be bad for the planet, when what really alarms him is the prospect of having less time to entertain himself.
By accident, Duncan’s fixations draw Tucker and Annie together: For 25 years he’s been preoccupied with the rocker’s one brilliant album, Juliet, which has just appeared in a stripped-down demo format called Juliet, Naked. On a blog that dissects every detail of the little that is known about the reclusive Tucker since he walked out of a concert in 1993, never to perform again, Annie trolls her boyfriend by posting a negative review of Juliet, Naked, which she derides as “boring versions of songs you’ve heard a million times before.” Tucker, who reads the blog, agrees, and tells her so in an email. The two become pen pals without telling Duncan, whose head would explode if he ever found out.
As directed by Jesse Peretz, whose sister Evgenia (the Peretzes are the children of former New Republic owner Martin) co-wrote the script with the husband-and-wife team of Jim Taylor and Tamara Jenkins, the movie is a rueful dramedy that captures the feel of Hornby’s sweet-tart writing. The book has a bit more bite than the film, but both of them are astute observations of the kinds of wayward souls who have lost touch with a truth that was obvious a couple of generations ago: The best recipe for contentment is to choose a partner, commit to him or her, and (probably) raise children together. In her late 30s, Annie finds herself suddenly desperate for children, but her boyfriend is essentially a kid himself, a perpetual adolescent wallowing in his TV shows and albums. He’s a spiritual cousin to the boy-men who spend their lives debating rock in Hornby’s High Fidelity and the self-indulgent TV-loving bachelor in About a Boy.
As for Tucker, the director introduces him beautifully. Initially we see him only through Duncan’s dazed eyes — he has papered the walls with photos of the rocker as a glamorous figure of angst and mystery. But when Tucker gets an email from Annie, we see it through the cracked screen of his sad old phone as he listlessly pushes his youngest son through a grocery store. It’s a witty tableau of a contemporary idol with feet of clay. Duncan and the other superfans tell each other legends about what happened to Tucker, but the truth is the best years of his life were drained away by drugs, alcohol, and Law & Order reruns. He thinks the Juliet album is garbage. Or perhaps that’s just his way of rationalizing his fears that he could never create something that good again.
Both Hawke and Byrne give deeply felt performances (while O’Dowd, whose work I generally enjoy, comes across a bit buffoonish). Hawke, looking appropriately weathered and sheepish, embodies the burdens of middle age and its ever-lengthening encyclopedia of regrets. When one of his many children informs Tucker that a good rule for parenting is to inform your children of the existence of their siblings, he says, “Sounds obvious when you say it.”
Byrne, an Australian who slips unobtrusively into a middle-class English accent, touchingly shows how kindness can decay into passivity for a certain kind of woman. Running a historical exhibition about how her town was in 1964, she meets an old woman who, though we spend only a moment with her, is the heart of the movie. Looking at an old picture of herself with a suitor she spurned, she says, speaking for many of her generation, “You can never go wrong not doing things.” Today, though, “I’m 84 years old and I’ve never been in any trouble in my whole bloody life.” Tucker has had too much trouble for one life. Annie hasn’t had enough.
IN THE NEWS: ‘Ruby Rose “Not Gay Enough” to Be Batwoman’