Romance
Four Letters Of Love (12A)
Review: Hopeless romantics prepare to swoon at director Polly Steele’s unabashedly wistful tale of cosmically connected soulmates, filmed on location in Co Antrim and Co Donegal with ravishing, picture postcard cinematography courtesy of Damien Elliott. Adapted for the screen by author Niall Williams from his international bestseller, Four Letters Of Love clings to its literary origins like a life vest, with lyrical dialogue that sounds more convincing tumbling from characters’ lips on the page.
Unexpected snowfall is poetically described as “an immense sky letter… falling silent and slow”, and a resourceful wife pithily explains one difference between the sexes: “A woman has intuition. It’s in a place where a man has stubbornness.” Parallel 1970s narratives ebb and flow between wild, untamed island locales and comparatively stifling suburbia. The disparity between these two situations is bluntly hammered home when an islander dreamily remarks that visitors to her paradise never truly leave once they have sampled the community’s simpler way of life.
Williams’s screenplay demands considerable generosity to chug down various contrivances, on-screen miracles and well-timed ghostly interventions with freshly poured pints of Irish whimsy. Gabriel Byrne and Helena Bonham Carter are appealingly matched as a happily married couple who want the best for their children, even if that means admitting their offspring might have said “I do” to the wrong person.
In 1971 Dublin, hard-working civil servant William Coughlan (Pierce Brosnan) experiences a heavenly vision at his desk, quits his job and announces his calling as a painter to his incredulous wife Bette (Imelda May) and 17-year-old son Nicholas (Fionn O’Shea). The patriarch leaves home for extended periods to capture the windswept beauty of the west of Ireland.
Meanwhile, island schoolmaster and poet Muiris Gore (Byrne) and his wife Margaret (Bonham Carter) are devastated when their son Sean (Donal Finn) suffers a fit during a walk with younger sister Isabel (Ann Skelly). He is rendered mute and immobile and Isabel reluctantly heads to the mainland to further her education under the withering glare of Mother Superior (Norma Sheahan). Charming local lad Peader (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo) helps Isabel to escape her crippling guilt about Sean’s paralysis and she contemplates a long-term commitment to match the “hard labour” of her parents’ 36-year marriage.
Four Letters Of Love is the cinematic equivalent of a hand-knitted sweater: cosy, comfortable and patiently crafted with heartfelt sincerity. Williams’s script relies heavily on an intrusive voiceover to convey Nicholas’s inner thoughts as the young man surveys the emotional divide to his father (“There was love but no language between us”) and accepts the hand that the universe ultimately deals him. Cold-hearted cynicism will comfortably weather the gentle storm that director Steele conjures on screen.
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Animation
Smurfs (U)
Review: I feel blue, and not in a satisfying and Smurfalicious way. Director Chris Miller’s colour-saturated reboot of the fun-loving film franchise based on lovable characters created by Belgian artist Peyo in 1958 is a lacklustre clone of Trolls replete with hip-swivelling song and dance numbers and a caterwaul from the heart, Always On The Outside sung by James Corden, which opens with the soul-searching lyric, “Who am I? Where do I belong?”. Smurfs doesn’t appear to know what it is or where it belongs in the glittering pantheon of computer-animated adventures.
Screenwriter Pam Brady struggles to strike a consistent tone that embraces a wholesome, community-oriented comic book legacy dating back nearly 70 years and the demands of modern cinema audiences who expect something that appeals to every member of the family. Rihanna’s casting as Smurfette doesn’t manifest the boss girl energy the film desperately needs. She provides original songs Anyone and Friend Of Mine and her 2007 hit Please Don’t Stop The Music blasts across a Parisian nightclub dance floor when the eponymous adventurers gatecrash our reality a la Sonic The Hedgehog. However, there’s little to distinguish her from Katy Perry, who previously commandeered the role. Other vocal cast members are similarly muted. True heroism might come out of the blue in Miller’s picture but in so many respects, these Smurfs are rendered in shades of grey.
Papa Smurf (voiced by John Goodman) secretly hides a magical book with the power to suck the goodness out of the universe in Smurf Village. His heroism thwarts the nefarious plans of The Alliance Of Evil Wizards comprising Asmodius (Octavia Spencer), Chernobog (Nick Kroll), Jezebeth (Hannah Waddingham) and Razamel (JP Karliak). By luck rather than diabolical design, Razamel kidnaps Papa Smurf and holds the bearded wonder hostage until he discloses the book’s location.
Smurfette (Rihanna) leads courageous kin including No Name (Corden), Vanity (Rylan Clark), Grouchy (Jon Richardson), Hefty (Alex Winter), Brainy (Xolo Mariduena) and Sound Effects (Spencer X) on a daredevil rescue mission into the real world. To protect their colourful universe, the diminutive heroes rely on Razamel’s embittered brother Gargamel (Karliak again) and Papa Smurf’s brother Ken (Nick Offerman).
Smurfs fails to shine bright like a diamond, refracting aspects of the aforementioned Trolls, Despicable Me and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, with an underlying message about embracing who you are. Digitally rendered visuals are solid and one diversion to the globe-trotting mission briefly introduces claymation, hand-drawn art, anime and 8-bit computer games to the mix. Miller’s film touches down with its heart in the right place but it is one small stumble rather than a giant leap for Smurfkind.
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