9 hours ago
4
FOUR LETTERS OF LOVE ★★
(M) 109 minutes
At the outset of Four Letters of Love, a man is touched by God. Toiling away in a dingy Dublin office, middle-aged civil servant William Coughlan (Pierce Brosnan) spies a square of sunlight on his desk and spontaneously decides to chuck it all in and become a painter.
Pierce Brosnan plays an artist in Four Letters of LoveCredit: Vertigo Releasing
Before long, he’s doing artist stuff like growing his hair shoulder-length and abandoning his family. Meanwhile, in the west of Ireland, we’re introduced to Isabel Gore (Ann Skelly), a younger free spirit who says things like “I want to go wild today” as she frolics on the edge of a cliff.
With all that, we’re still only a couple of minutes into this wildly over-the-top melodrama, directed by UK-based Polly Steele, whose previous credits include the unfortunately titled climbing documentary The Mountain Within Me, and scripted by the Irish writer Niall Williams, adapting his 1997 novel.
Williams’ field isn’t out-and-out trash but a particular brand of frantic “literary” overwriting, much of which gets channelled here into Fionn O’Shea’s voiceover as William’s son Nicholas, looking back at his early-1970s youth from decades on (“To these days I am to return again and again throughout my life, for in them is the immanence of love”).
Isabel and Nicholas are soulmates, she with her frizzy red hair, he with his look of gormless yearning. But the film takes its time bringing them together, tantalising us by having them cross paths a couple of times without meeting.
Helena Bonham Carter and Gabriel Byrne play the “sensible adults” in Four Letters of Love.Credit: Vertigo Releasing
By halfway through, one of William’s paintings has wound up in the possession of Isabel’s parents, Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) and Muiris (Gabriel Byrne). But even when Nicholas seeks it out, this isn’t enough to put him in the same room as Isabel, who is meanwhile set on marrying Peader (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), her designated Mr Wrong.
In spirit, this is a very slightly elevated Hallmark movie – but there are worse things to be, and under the circumstances it’s a point in Steele’s favour that she isn’t afraid of excess. Like Williams, she goes all out: wide-angle lenses, shafts of light illuminating otherwise drab interiors, sweeping shots of the craggy coastline with waves crashing onto rocks.
The weakness is the love story at the heart of it all. Skelly and O’Shea are both pleasant-looking, which is most of what’s required of them – but even at the climax, Nicholas remains too reined-in and tentative to be an effective hero of a grand romance.
Ultimately, this is less a casting issue than a problem with the whole premise. For obvious reasons, a character whose most forceful act is to write a series of letters is likely to work better in print than on the screen.
It also appears the choice has been made to pitch the film at the generation that bought the novel in the 1990s, which is to say the veterans are the real stars. Brosnan is easily the most forceful male presence, despite or due to relying on pure ham and showing no sign of taking the material any more seriously than he did in Mamma Mia!
Bonham Carter and Byrne are less fortunate, since their characters are meant to be the sensible adults despite the absurd material they’re supplied with. Bonham Carter has an especially doomed scene where she combs her adult daughter’s hair while imparting home truths about the hard work of keeping a marriage alive.
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Byrne seems to be trying not to be noticed, but in a movie where everyone speaks in nuggets of pseudo-wisdom, his relatively subdued character probably comes closest to making sense. “None of us really know anything. You find a road and you walk along it as best you can.”
Four Letters of Love is in cinemas from today.
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