There’s nothing like a good Irish movie with some edge to it. So it’s too bad that “Four Letters of Love” is nothing like a good Irish movie with some edge to it. Ar ar ar. But seriously. With its every-shot-a-painting (albeit many by Thomas Kinkade) cinematography and mise-en-scene and its multiple love-conquers-all-and-even-if-it-doesn’t-it’s-all-that-matters threaded narrative, the movie, directed by Polly Steele from a script by Niall Williams, who wrote the novel upon which it is based, seems like a one-movie campaign to refute all the works of Martin McDonagh and of his brother John Michael McDonagh besides. And if it can take down Neil Jordan, Jim Sheridan, Samuel Beckett and other self-critical Gaelic downers besides, all the better.
For this is a family-size helping of Irish treacle. The title promises four narratives. The movie itself intertwines them in ways one understands might be inevitable. Which is itself a convoluted way of calling the enterprise predictable. We begin with narrator Nicholas (Fionn O’Shea) recalling the early ‘70s and a time when his da, up until now a civil servant, saw God in a rectangle of sunlight on a letter at his office table and walked out of the bureaucratic life and took up as a painter. Both versions of the patriarch are played by Pierce Brosnan, first wearing his own hair, then sporting a wig that might have been thrown out by the prop people of the “Highlander’ franchise. Yowsah. This nonconformity of his father possibly hones Nicholas’ own romantic side. Fate will eventually bring him together with…wait, is this a spoiler? Maybe I better not go quite so far.
Suffice it to say that another narrative galumphs along not quite in tandem with Nicholas’, one in which a poet (Gabriel Byrne) and his wife (Helena Bonham-Carter) have two teen kids, one brought low by a paralysis-causing fit, the other a free spirit who’s sent to live with nuns, as frequently happens to free spirits in Irish popular literature. As incarnated by Ann Skelly, Isabel, or “Issy,” is an ingenuous enchantress, and her mother HBC is going to do everything in her power to keep her from Nicholas.
This is a lot for one movie, and I’m rather surprised that Niall Williams didn’t hold out for a mini-series, which would have suited this reviewer just fine, as in that case I wouldn’t have had to review it. In the plus column, the movie’s cast, even those members who appear to be a bit at sea—and Brosnan unfortunately fits into this category—are a pleasure to watch, and while the scenic imagery is hella trite on the one hand it is also, as is sometimes the corollary in these circumstances, easy on the eyes.
