“Right love. Wrong time.” That is the tagline for Love, Rosie, and it is also the whole movie. Christian Ditter directed it. Juliette Towhidi wrote the screenplay, working from Cecelia Ahern’s 2004 novel Where Rainbows End. Lily Collins plays Rosie Dunne. Sam Claflin plays Alex Stewart. The two meet at age five and spend the rest of the film almost, but not quite, getting it right.
Trailer, via LionsgateFilmsUK.
Rosie’s eighteenth birthday and the kiss Alex remembers
The hinge of the whole story is a party. Rosie turns eighteen. She and Alex are drunk. He kisses her. In that moment he understands he has feelings for her. She does not remember it at all.
The next day she is nursing a hangover and has had her stomach pumped. She tells Alex she wishes the night had never happened. He hears a friend drawing a line. She means only that she regrets the drinking. That gap — what he heard against what she meant — is the engine of everything that follows. It is a good engine. It is also the only one the film has.
Greg, described as the fittest guy in their year, asks Rosie to the school dance. She had planned to go with Alex. She accepts Greg after she learns Alex is thinking of asking Bethany, the popular girl. After the dance, Rosie has sex with Greg. The condom slips off inside her. That is the film’s entire mechanism for the rest of the plot. One piece of latex, one misunderstanding, and two lives bend away from each other.
Boston College, Harvard and the pregnancy Rosie hides
Rosie wants to run her own hotel. Her father works as a valet in one, and that is where the ambition comes from. She applies to a hotel management course at Boston College and gets in. She rushes to tell Alex. She finds him having sex with Bethany. She vomits.
Then she finds out she is pregnant. She refuses to tell Alex, because she is afraid he will give up Harvard to help her. That decision is the film’s real subject, and it is the one it treats most lightly. She has the baby. She names her Katie. Alex leaves for the United States.
He learns about the pregnancy from Bethany, not from Rosie, after Rosie runs into her with Katie. He becomes the child’s godfather. That is the fact the film hands you, and it is a cold one.
Sally, Boston and the morning Rosie leaves angry
Five years pass. Rosie visits Alex in Boston. They spend the night talking and going to places. It is the best stretch of the film, because it is the only stretch where the two of them are simply in a room together with nothing to hide behind.
The next morning Rosie learns that Alex’s girlfriend Sally is pregnant. She criticizes how he lives and tries to talk to him about it. He rebuffs her. He says at least their child will have both parents. Rosie leaves Boston infuriated. That line is the closest the film comes to giving Alex an interior life, and it arrives late and leaves fast. She reconciles with Greg.
Lily Collins carries a script that will not carry her
Collins is the reason to watch Love, Rosie, and the film knows it. She gets the only performance with any weather in it. Her performance was singled out for praise by critics and audiences alike, and that judgment holds up. The film is better whenever she is on screen alone.
The problem is Claflin. Alex is written as a man who reacts, and Claflin plays him as a man who waits to be told what he feels. The two leads share scenes easily enough, in this reviewer’s view, but the film asks that ease to do work that only writing can do.
What Love, Rosie gets wrong about its own timeline
The film addresses teen pregnancy, adoption, grief and adultery. This reviewer’s complaint is that it raises those subjects and then does little with them. Katie is barely present as she grows. Rosie’s hotel ambition is set up and then set aside. The adoption theme is raised and left where it sits.
The film also leans hard on its time jumps. It moves to the reunions and skips the lives in between. A story about two people separated by circumstance has to show the circumstance. Love, Rosie shows the separations and trusts the audience to fill in the rest.
That is a real failure, and it is why the ending lands soft. The film has spent its runtime telling us these two belong together. It has not spent enough time showing us who they became apart.
The case for Love, Rosie as comfort viewing
There is a version of this movie that works. The tagline is honest. The premise is sturdy, in this reviewer’s view. The film is based on Ahern’s 2004 novel Where Rainbows End. Ditter directed it, and the result is a film that moves.
The supporting cast does what it is asked. Christian Cooke plays Greg. Tamsin Egerton plays Sally. Suki Waterhouse plays Bethany Williams. Jaime Winstone plays Ruby. Jamie Beamish plays Phil. Art Parkinson plays Rosie’s brother Gary. Lorcan Cranitch and Ger Ryan play her parents, Dennis and Alice Dunne. Lily Laight and Rosa Molloy split the role of Katie across two ages.
Nobody embarrasses themselves. Nobody gets enough to do.
Here is the ranking of what actually works in Love, Rosie, from most to least:
- Lily Collins as Rosie Dunne, who gives the film a person instead of a premise.
- The Boston night, the only sequence where the two leads get to be adults in the same room.
- The birthday kiss and its misreading, which is a clean and genuinely painful idea.
- The supporting cast, competent and stranded.
- The timeline, which skips over the years that mattered.
- The ending, which this reviewer finds rushed rather than earned.
The film premiered in London on 6 October 2014 and opened in theaters on 22 October 2014. It grossed $25.5 million worldwide. Critics received it poorly. It garnered positive reviews from audiences. That contrast is easy to explain. Love, Rosie is not a good film. It is a film that is easy to be fond of. Those are different things, and the gap between them is exactly the gap the movie is about.
Our verdict on Love, Rosie
Love, Rosie is a romance that mistakes delay for depth. It has one strong idea — a kiss one person remembers and the other does not — and it never builds on it the way it should. Collins is worth the ticket. The script is not. The film’s treatment of teen pregnancy, adoption and grief is glancing at best, and its central couple is separated less by circumstance than by a screenplay that keeps cutting away whenever something real might happen. Watch it for her. Do not watch it expecting the years in between.
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