Oh. Hello there. Truthfully, I'm a little shocked you've stopped at this page. It's not that I don't want you to read my bit on "Letters to Juliet"; I'd love it, in fact. But sometimes I wonder if I'm wasting everyone's time by reviewing these defiantly clichéd Hollywood romances. Rarely can they endure critical scrutiny, but that never matters. There's always a steadfast audience for what I will lazily call chick flicks, and few, if any, can be swayed for or against by a humble essay. With apologies to Forrest Gump, most romantic movies are like a box of chocolates after some jerk has bitten all the candy in half: you know exactly what you're gonna get, and everything's totally gooey.

"Letters to Juliet" stars the suddenly ubiquitous Amanda Seyfried (February's "Dear John" and March's "Chloe") as Sophie, an ambitious fact checker for The New Yorker who we meet as she's about to travel to Italy with her chef fiancé Victor (an annoyingly spazzy Gael García Bernal) for their "pre-honeymoon." Though it was always intended as a working vacation (Victor is meeting with suppliers for his new restaurant), Sophie finds herself with more alone time than she had hoped for in cozy Verona, so one day she visits the reported home of Juliet Capulet, one-half of what are arguably literature's most famous star-crossed lovers. At Casa di Guilietta, tourists grope a bronze Juliet for luck and leave notes asking the fictitious teenage suicide victim for advice on amore.

A quartet of dedicated women take it upon themselves to answer these missives, and it is through them that Sophie stumbles across the long-forgotten note that will set our plot into motion. Written in 1957 by a lovelorn English teen named Claire about the Italian boy she had left behind, the letter earns a heartfelt reply from Juliet's newest secretary, who is understandably delighted and surprised when the woman soon rolls into Verona. Claire is played, with effortless grace, by Vanessa Redgrave, and it is because of Sophie's encouragement that Claire has descended upon Italy in search of her long-lost love. Claire's travel companion is her protective grandson (a dull Heath Ledger/Ryan Phillippe hybrid named Christopher Egan), so naturally his disapproving priggishness will be slowly eroded by the lonely but sassy Sophie, who smells a potential story and accompanies the pair through the Tuscan countryside on their hunt for the elusive Lorenzo Bartolini.

Of course you can see where this is going (literally, if you've watched the unnecessarily comprehensive trailer) and it's nothing you haven't experienced before. But since moviegoers demand a happily-ever-after, woe be to those who don't deliver. Gary Winick directs here (he made last year's atrocious "Bride Wars" as well as 2004's giddy guilty pleasure "13 Going On 30") and, save for some overt fetishizing of the ravishing Seyfried, basically just points the camera where stuff is going down. Fortunately, most of that stuff is going down against a luscious, sun-dappled background, the trio making their way through the heaving hills of Siena as Claire bewitches the all of the frisky senior signori who also happen to be named Lorenzo Bartolini. "Letters to Juliet" is essentially wanton travel porn starring a seductive Tuscany. The website you'll need is www.alitalia.com.

Unfortunately, most of "Letters to Juliet" isn't worthy of its physical beauty. The inoffensive script, by Jose Rivera (he also adapted "The Motorcycle Diaries") and Tim Sullivan, is nonetheless trite, full of clunky lines meant to sound deep but instead usually eliciting a skyward eye roll. Oliver Platt is wasted in a too-brief part as Sophie's editor, while Bernal's Victor is just plain strange, a manic man of indeterminate ethnic origin who we're meant to root against because of what the movie considers too much self-absorption in his job. Victor is opening a restaurant in six weeks; we're supposed to punish him for what now? His passion? His dedication? No matter; there's no chemistry between the Snoopy-like Bernal and Seyfried anyway, though she shares none with Egan either.

Seyfried actually does her most organic bonding with Redgrave, whose late-career luminosity is the best and perhaps only reason to make time for "Letters to Juliet." Filmed just after the sudden death of daughter Natasha Richardson, Redgrave's performance is suffused with a bittersweet gravitas specific to those whose experience with faith-shaking loss allows them to embrace life's unknowns. And in a lovely parallel, Claire's Lorenzo is played by the distractingly blue-eyed Franco Nero, who had a son with Redgrave back when they made 1967's "Camelot." Thirty-six years after the affair ended, it began again...