![]() Their author is Anthony (Turner), a scrappy London financial journalist besotted with Jennifer (Woodley), the cosseted American trophy wife of wealthy, wooden-hearted business magnate Larry (Joe Alwyn), whom he meets in the summer of 1965 on a French Riviera trip of sunlit village rambles and glittering yacht rides. The love letters that bounce the film’s narrative across the decades are floridly impassioned missives, full of swollen-hearted feeling and do-or-die pleas - the kind, the film unsubtly and wistfully observes, that feel desirably quaint in the age of instant messaging and eggplant emoji. The film opens with an on-screen quote from Ernest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms,” scrawled across the screen like an original love note: “Why, darling, I don’t live at all when I’m not with you.” It’s a somewhat misleading choice of literary flourish, and not just because the classic novel that unites its star-crossed couple in fact turns out to be Evelyn Waugh’s “Scoop.” Suffice it to say that “Last Letter” is an awfully long way from the elemental terseness of Hemingway even at his most romantic. Even at its most generic, however, this letter from an unlikely woman fills a gaping slot in the summer schedule for grown-up, female-oriented entertainment, and should find keen recipients upon its release on Netflix in the U.S., and in theaters across the pond. Yet Frizzell tackles the period portion of the saga with some directorial verve, committing to its saturated, hyper-styled romanticism and shameless storytelling contrivance to a degree that is all but irresistible - and unfortunately leaves the remainder of the film feeling anonymous and less involving by comparison. Alwyn also plays a bit of a bore as her husband, so it is hard to feel much involvement in her romantic plight either way, at least for much of the film, this despite gorgeous Majorca locations that give the story some sweep.Having previously made her name with the spiky, Sundance-stamped girls-gone-wild comedy “Never Goin’ Back,” director Augustine Frizzell doesn’t seem an obvious fit for any of the dewy, edgeless mini-movies that make up “The Last Letter From Your Lover”: Sure enough, she had no hand in the script, which playwright Nick Payne and author Esta Spalding have drawn with little great inspiration from the 2008 bestseller by Jojo Moyes, the same wildly popular romance novelist who wrote “Me Before You.” Part of the problem is Turner, who doesn’t help by turning in a flat, bloodless performance (no Ryan Gosing, he). She doesn’t quite convince here and seems to be trying to connect to this character, never really making us believe in the passion she feels for this handsome man who has swept her off her feet. Jones adds a lot of signature spunk to the proceedings, but I have to say Woodley seems a little miscast in an Audrey Hepburn-ish glamour role, dressed impeccably and caught up in luxurious surroundings. I found the filmmaking from director Augustine Frizzell to be a little disjointed and thoroughly confusing as the tale of these two females unfolds in bits and pieces in the movie’s first half, but fortunately, once it finds its true footing, the film comes together, leading to a satisfying finish for lovers of all ages. This film clearly is targeted at women, and because Moyes has such a following, The Last Letter from Your Lover likely will draw them to Netflix to check it out. And could it be that those letters from long ago are the engine that makes a direct connection between Ellie and Jennifer. Flashbacks to her own life and flash-forwards to Ellie’s investigation fill in the details of what essentially is a story of two women in different eras both drawn to true love but not easily achieving it. But wait, in a plot device worthy of the greatest weepies, as they used to be affectionately known in Hollywood, we learn that Jennifer has been in a car accident and emerged with no memory of the men in her life and any of those letters she received, simply signed “B” in most cases. But it is all first set in place in 1965 with the story of Jennifer Stirling (Shailene Woodley), wife of a wealthy industrialist named Laurence (Joe Alwyn), who slowly becomes irresistibly involved with Anthony O’Hare (Callum Turner), the journalist who has come into her life while doing a story on her husband. That is the question dogging Ellie Haworth (Felicity Jones), who with the help of her archivist Rory McCallan (nicely played by Nabhaan Rizwan), sets out to learn more, and in the process perhaps ignite a relationship of their own.
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