A common refrain is that the sign of a great actor is one that makes a good movie great. Respectfully, I disagree. A sign of a great actor is someone who makes a crappy movie watchable: think Tom Cruise in Cocktail. This gets me to Juliet, Naked. This story is 2/3 about uninteresting and 100% about awful people. However, Rose Byrne, Chris O’Dowd, and Ethan Hawke take this Nick Hornby tale and drag it into mediocrity, a true sign of their talents.
One of these awful people is Chris O’Dowd’s Duncan. He’s a grown professor who hosts a blog about his favorite musician from when he was a kid, Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke). Though Crowe is Duncan’s true love, he also has a live in girlfriend, Annie (Rose Byrne). Annie is a woman who lets life come to her, afraid to take a risk and try something new, so she gets caught up in Duncan’s Crowe fever. After listening to Juliet, Naked, Crowe’s an uplugged version of Crowe’s most famous album, Annie goes on Duncan’s blog and rips it to pieces. This elicits a response from none other than Crowe himself directly to Annie, where the two strike up an online correspondence before fate decides to bring them together.
Juliet, Naked’s biggest story hindrance is timing. If this had come out 20 years ago, it could have been more interesting, because the term manic pixie dream girl didn’t exist. That term is a movie term, where a cute, perfectly capable woman helps a damaged artistic man grow up and become someone of substance again. Rose Byrne’s character is that girl for 2 men in this movie. Duncan is a professor in a state of arrested development and Tucker Crowe obviously has many demons from his past that continually haunt him in the form of adorable children from several mothers. Juliet, Naked’s wrinkle is that Byrne herself is in a state of stasis, and also needs to be awoken. However, her wokeness comes from taking on Tucker’s crazy problems and helping him with them somehow wakes her up? But NOT her break up with her longterm boyfriend Duncan? Doesn’t add up to me. The treatment of Duncan here is also pretty shitty, being relegated to a plot device for the first half of the movie to get Byrne interested in Crowe, and then being forgotten until Byrne has an emotional and character breakthrough. Most importantly, and sadly, Annie and Duncan just aren’t that interesting people. Watching them fight over pointless nonsense while living a life that decides for them just isn’t fun to watch onscreen.
And yet, I noticed, while I was eyerolling at the story, I was laughing, quite a lot at times. This is because each of the 3 leads are cast very well. Patty O’Dowd is very amusing when he’s worked up about something, and thankfully, that’s basically Duncan’s whole thing. His vlog’s are friggin hilarious, with him waxing poetic about Crowe’s lone album with a bunch of losers like him. Tucker despises his album, so when Duncan finally meets Tucker, O’Dowd plays those interactions with a mixture of fear, confusion, and boyish giddy, all in very amusing ways. Ethan Hawke playing a washed up Gen X alt rock artist is obviously smart casting because of Hawke’s past. However, the mega talented actor, who’s probably gonna get nominated for an Oscar again this year, plays Crowe as someone who’s trying to run away from responsibility at all times, except with his youngest son. Hawke doesn’t try to make Tucker likable, but he does show enough to make you understand and be drawn by his charisma, one of Hawke’s greatest strengths. And holding the picture together is the adorable Rose Byrne. No matter what she does, Byrne has a way of making you like her. Her Annie here is someone designed to be rooted for, but you despise because she doesn’t do anything for herself ever. That woman could easily become a bitchy shrew, but Byrne enlivens Annie with an exasperated longing but inherent kindness, making you like the character despite the crap she has to say.
Thanks to Rose Byrne, Chris O’Dowd, and Ethan Hawke, Juliet, Naked will be simply forgotten. Without their talents, the movie I think could have turned into a loathsome self-important wanna be Woody Allen type movie. It also inspired a new web series: Chris O’Dowd Explains, where the actor gets very excited or heated about something, and just vlogs about it. I would watch every episode…