Helena Bonham Carter and Pierce Brosnan can't save this clanger of a film
(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.
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.
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.
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