17-07-2025
Four Letters of Love review — Pierce Brosnan can't save this Irish cliché
As a rule, novelists don't make great screenwriters. They're too in love with prose and too beguiled by the musicality of language to submit to the ruthless demands of visual storytelling. Cormac McCarthy's only original screenplay, The Counselor, is a case in point, as is F Scott Fitzgerald's Three Comrades and anything, including Sleepwalkers, that Stephen King has written directly for the screen.
Step forward Niall Williams, the award-winning Irish novelist. He has delivered a screenplay adapted from his own debut novel that is splattered with wearisome wall-to-wall voiceover and punctuated by the kind of melodramatic contrivances that can be hidden inside poetical pages but on the screen provoke only eye rolls, yawns and a couple of dry retches. Not even the strong cast, which includes Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne and Helena Bonham Carter, can save it.
The setting is 1970s Oireland, a mythical place where the men are all self-tortured poets, artists and musicians, and the women are ginger and vivacious and good at Irish dancing, like Jean Butler from Riverdance. In the opening scene we learn that the mopey Dublin writer Nicholas (Fionn O'Shea, recycling his Beckett turn from Dance First) is destined for a life of romantic bliss with the Aran Islands-based wild child Isobel (Ann Skelly). And so for the next nearly two hours we watch and wait, Sleepless in Seattle-style, for our two lovers to meet while the film aimlessly spins its narrative wheels. Cue mildly distracting yet dramatically pointless episodes showcasing Nicholas looking forlorn, Isobel marrying the wrong guy, someone having a stroke, several people talking out loud to God (typical Catholics!), and Brosnan, Byrne and Bonham Carter given little to do as parents in distress.
It doesn't help that the director, Polly Steele (The Mountain Within Me), has seemingly chosen to fill the narrative longueurs with endless drone shots of the Irish countryside. Pretty, yes. But they can only offer so much damage limitation.★★☆☆☆12A, 110minIn cinemas from Jul 18
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