No more reminiscent of the Beatles’ tune than of Danish director Susanne Bird’s excellent prior films (In a Better World, Brothers), Love Is All You Need, well, could use a lot more movie. It wears its thinness like a badge of honor while basically showering us with cliches that seem proud they’re not part of a showy Hollywood-style rom-com sledgehammer, but remain cliches nonetheless.
We start out with a hairdresser, Ida (a very good Trine Dyrholm), coming home from a breast cancer treatment only to find her bag-of-wind husband fornicating on their couch with his young blond secretary. “Your illness is tough for me, too,” he defends. Too easily willing to forgive, Idea’s self-esteem couldn’t be any lower. Enter the rich Philip (Pierce Brosnan, who looks mostly bored here). Still remorseful after losing his wife in an accident, Philip is withdrawn, both from life and from his son, who’s getting ready to marry Ida’s daughter.
Only he and Ida, despite living in the same city, have somehow never met.
Soon he’s berating her in an airport parking lot after she smacks her car into his, and, lo and behold, they come to realize each other’s true identity before boarding the same plane to their kids’ wedding in Sorrento. Brosnan’s rustic villa there will soon entertain a cast of semi-stock characters looking to celebrate and finding it not so easy. Just when we think we might get a little more depth from the two main characters, Bier rolls out picture-postcard shots of the Amalfi Coast, or, worst, peels off a reprise of the film’s soundtrack theme: Dean Martin’s “That’s Amore.” If you thought “When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie” had played itself out in the 25-year-old Moonstruck, so did I.
Not a terrible film, Love is All You Need mostly frustrates. Insights sneak in to remind us of Bier’s talent. Philip’s overbearingingly crass sister-in-law, Benedikite (a great Paprika Steen) gives Bronson a couple of scenes to entertainingly prove he’s more than a match for her cynicism. The film’s wedding “climax” is both heartfelt and amusing Yet love Is All You Need’s building blocks gain little traction. Too bad. Lost in its depiction of a family’s little rumpuses (Ida’s husband defiantly brings his shallow secretary to the wedding) is the film’s larger theme of two lonely opposite-personality types finding each other and overcoming fate’s ugly hand. More than once Philip and Ida simultaneously head out to parallel balconies in his villa yet both stare ahead, seemingly isolated from each other. Sure they eventually connect, but there’s a cagey, this-only-happens-in-the-movies feel to it all. Filmmakers as good as Bier, even when attempting to go light, usually have you believing rather than pretending.