Juliet, Naked review: A story about middle-age disappointment and disillusionment

Even the whimsical humour can’t always hide the desperation of the characters as they see their opportunities for happiness and fulfilment slipping away

Geoffrey Macnab
Thursday 01 November 2018 12:17 GMT
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Dir: Jesse Peretz; Starring: Rose Byrne, Ethan Hawke, Chris O’Dowd. Cert 15, 98 mins

Whether you’re a one-time American rock star or a British woman stuck in a rut in a provincial seaside British town, life sucks. That is one of the bleaker insights from the latest Nick Hornby adaptation. Juliet, Naked is a story about middle-age disappointment and disillusionment.

Characters will mention in passing that they’ve wasted their entire lives, letting whole decades slip through their fingers. Even so, the film still somehow plays like an upbeat romcom, squeezing all the humour and optimism it can from such an unpromising premise. In spite of the downbeat subject matter, it is charming and well observed.

It doesn’t dig very deep, though, and occasionally has the same smug quality as its most memorable character, the obsessive music fan Duncan (Chris O’Dowd), who knows everything there is to know about his favourite singer-songwriter, the reclusive Tucker Crowe, “one of the most unsung figures of alternative rock”.

Crowe was a cult indie rock figure in the US in the early 1990s but was last seen leaving the men’s toilets after a gig in Minneapolis. (The archive footage suggests he was a cross between Jeff Buckley and the guitarist from Spinal Tap.) Since then, he has vanished but cultural studies lecturer Duncan, who keeps a shrine to Tucker in the basement, clings to the hope that he might, one day, re-emerge. Duncan’s long-suffering girlfriend Annie (Rose Byrne) has to put up with his Tucker Crowe habit.

In his own gentle way, director Jesse Peretz is revealing all the main protagonists here in an unsympathetic light. Annie once studied in London (“the best years”) but is now stuck in Sandcliff (the film was shot in Ramsgate), running the local museum, where she is planning a new show devoted to 1964 – a year in which it seems nothing much happened in the town anyway other than one of the locals catching sight of a shark.

She doesn’t have kids. She has never had any adventures. For recreation, she either heads to the pub with her lesbian sister, Ros (Lily Brazier), or will go with Duncan to the local Indian restaurant. She dreams of unconditional love but all that Duncan provides is “faint conditional affection”.

While Annie is miserable in Sandcliff, Tucker Crowe (Ethan Hawke) isn’t having any better a time of it over in the US. Near broke, he lives in the garage of one of his ex-wives. He has had so many children that he can barely remember all their names. He can’t remember the words to his own songs either. Duncan may see him as a visionary but that is not at all how Tucker regards himself.

The film throws in humorous but nuanced insights into the vexed relationship between fans and their idols. At first glance, Duncan seems delusional – far more interested in the mythical Tucker Crowe he and other enthusiasts share stories about on social media than in Annie. O’Dowd plays him in very entertaining fashion, capturing both the comedy and pathos in the character. He can seem very petty and neurotic as he frets about Annie listening to a rare Tucker Crowe recording before he does. There is, though, something admirable and pure in his passion for the enigmatic rock star. Crowe may dismiss his own work but Duncan takes it very seriously. It matters to him. As he puts it, in one of the film’s best lines, “art isn’t for the artist any more than water is for the plumber”.

O’Dowd’s Duncan may steal most of the scenes in which he appears but he is a secondary character. The main focus is on Annie and Tucker. Duncan inadvertently brings them together. They couldn’t be more different. She is the repressed British woman, a contemporary equivalent to Brief Encounter’s Celia Johnson, who wears floral dresses, “sensible” cardigans and looks like anybody else on the high street.

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Tucker is the ageing rocker who has always despised convention but can’t face family responsibility without running the other way. Annie and Tucker begin an email relationship and discover that they understand each other perfectly. The irony is that she can’t stand his music.

Inevitably, the American rock star is lured to the British seaside town. He sticks out here just as much as, say, the real-life Marvin Gaye must have done when he went to live in Ostend. The local mayor (Phil Davis) makes a very big fuss of him without quite knowing who he is. One of Tucker’s young sons is with him too and the rock star is determined to show his qualities as a father.

In the course of the movie, we get to hear various of Tucker’s songs, including the one about Juliet, on the soundtrack. Detractors may regard Tucker’s work as “insipid, self-pitying” mush but Hawke sings all the songs, written by Robyn Hitchcock and Ryan Adams among others, with complete conviction. His renditions are enough to convince us that the fictional rock star really does have some of the talent that Duncan claims. We also see him giving a heartfelt performance of The Kinks’ “Waterloo Sunset”.

The mood is kept light and whimsical throughout. Juliet, Naked is very soft-centred. Even so, the humour can’t always hide the desperation of the characters as they see their opportunities for happiness and fulfilment slipping away.

Juliet, Naked is released in UK cinemas on 2 November

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