'Letters to Juliet': Lovely leading ladies and one miscast Romeo

According to website reviews, Juliet's Balcony in Verona, Italy, is one of Europe's tackiest fake tourist traps. Fanny-packed romantics swarm to the cobbled court and leave behind missives asking her spirit to bless their love or ease their heartache.

It's like a Wailing Wall for amorous pilgrims who forget that Shakespeare's fictional lovers were doomed to tragedy.

Nevertheless, the premise lends a quixotic start to "Letters to Juliet," a blithely frivolous movie that glows with as much starry-eyed cliché and scenic splendor as it shudders with illogic and lack of common sense.

Chief among the lovely sights is Amanda Seyfried, whose alluring doe-eyed charm is one-third responsible for keeping the movie out of a morass of romantic sap.

Parts two and three are sweeping vistas of landscapes in Tuscany and the effortless brilliance of Vanessa Redgrave, whose beauty and grace make even the most far-fetched plot points tolerable.

Seyfried plays Sophie, an aspiring writer and fact-checker for The New Yorker on a pre-wedding honeymoon with her distracted, workaholic restaurateur fiance, Victor (Gael García Bernal).

Seemingly content to do their own things, Victor scours the countryside in search of Chianti and Pecorino while Sophie gets caught up in a cheese hunt of her own. She becomes intrigued by the coterie of women who collect notes left on the wall and lovingly answer each one.

Sensing a story worthy of Nicholas Sparks, she joins "Juliet's Secretaries" and responds to a letter that has been languishing behind a loose stone for 50 years.

Enter Claire (Redgrave), who's been living with "what if" ever since asking Juliet for advice over ditching a swarthy Italian soul mate on a teenage trip to Verona in 1957. Based on Sophie's eloquent, delayed response, she's come back to find him with her priggish, disapproving grandson, Charlie (Christopher Egan) in tow.

Unsurprisingly, the romantic bludgeon hits its mark with all three finding their destiny under the golden Tuscan sun.

Franco Nero as the Italian boy grown into a distinguished vintner is exactly right for Claire (he is Redgrave's husband, after all).

But the miscast Egan as Charlie is so completely unappealing and clearly wrong for Sophie that she'd be better off back in Verona beseeching Juliet, "wherefore art my Romeo?"

Ted Fry: tedfry@hotmail.com