EVEN HELENA BONHAM CARTER CAN’T STOP FOUR LETTERS OF LOVE BEING A STODGY MESS

“In this world, there’s no such thing as chance,” William (Pierce Brosnan) tells his son Nicholas (Normal People’s Fionn O’Shea), early on in this adaptation of Niall Williams’s bestselling 1997 novel. That’s mightily convenient for William, who, we learn in the film’s first scene, has been instructed by God to leave his dull desk job in the civil service, abandon his family and decamp to the west coast of Ireland to be a painter. Inspirational!

Four Letters of Love is a film deeply concerned with destiny. William is destined to be a painter, and Nicholas is destined to love Isabel. First, he must meet her, though – they only meet right at the end of the film – and the mysterious happenings and divine interventions that piece together a life are the business of most of the story rather than the couple’s actual romance.

The film switches between the pair’s home lives. First, we have serious-minded Nicholas, struggling with his mother to cope with the sudden absence of his father, and then, on his father’s return, to find a way to connect emotionally to this man who left so abruptly.

Then there is passionate Isabel (Ann Skelly), growing up on a small island off the coast. Her brilliant, if slightly hapless, father, Muiris (Gabriel Byrne), is a poet; her mother, Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter), a wise housewife delivering faux feminist diatribes about turning men into the husbands you want them to be.

When Isabel’s brother Sean suffers a mysterious fit that renders him mute and wheelchair-bound, Isabel is packed off to a convent school on the mainland. Naturally, she escapes and falls in love with the appropriately inappropriate shopkeeper Peader (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo). Tortured poet Nicholas is clearly a better fit for Issy, but how shall they ever meet?

The film is beautifully shot (cinematographer Damien Elliott is a Game of Thrones veteran and used to shooting the dappled sun on the Wild Atlantic and West Ireland’s rugged coasts), but it has a slightly stodgy, hyper-literary feel. Perhaps that’s because Williams himself wrote the script. Earnest voice-overs from Nicholas (“There was love but no language between us,” he laments) feel very much lifted from the pages of a novel in a way that never quite translates to the screen.

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The film is also burdened by an overconfidence in the righteousness of artistic self-fulfilment. We get glimpses of the poverty and desperation that might await Isabel, and indeed Nicholas, should they take a wrong turn, but they are always given an elegant gloss, as if to insist that poetry is better than food. When ghosts start appearing to guide the living towards their destiny one senses that director Polly Steele (behind 2017’s Let Me Go, a film similarly obsessed with generational loss) simply didn’t quite know what to do with those apparitions, the type of thing than can feel powerfully elegiac on the page but start to look silly on screen.

The impressive older cast carries the film somewhat – it is never not fun watching a wild and long, white-haired Brosnan settle into his later life professional incarnation of a benign elderly gentleman; this is the Brosnan not of Bond nor Mobland but of Mamma Mia. And despite Margaret’s improbable aphorisms, Bonham Carter, along with Byrne, retains a lot of watchable gravitas.

But the film feels limp, palpably too dependent on its source to emerge as its own thing. To convey the messages it wants to convey, it needed to work much harder to be more than just a pretty painting.

2025-07-18T05:24:24Z