Love, Rosie (2014)
Directed by Christian Ditter
Since the moment they met at age 5, Rosie and Alex have been best friends, facing the highs and lows of growing up side by side. A fleeting shared moment, one missed opportunity, and the decisions that follow send their lives in completely different directions. As each navigates the complexities of life, love, and everything in between, they always find their way back to each other - but is it just friendship, or something more?
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9 films that influenced Love, Rosie
What critics say influenced Love, Rosie
With its 12-year narrative timeframe, comfy middle-class Britishisms and sparky pairing of striving, pure-hearted girl and raffish, self-oriented guy, “Love, Rosie” evokes Rob Reiner’s aforementioned 1989 hit far less than it does Lone Scherfig’s “One Day” (2011) — another polished adaptation of a megaselling romantic novel, but one that fell oddly short of commercial expectations.
Love, Rosie will appeal to teenage girls, should cheer up those disappointed with the adaptation of the similarly themed One Day, and will interest those who have enjoyed the Brit-coms of Richard Curtis over the years.
Like Lone Scherfig's disastrous One Day , the film involves best friends who seem destined to become a couple, but don't.
Love, Rosie plays out a little like a cross between a Richard Curtis film and One Day without ever managing to find its own groove.
Love, Rosie is a comedy of errors in the vein of When Harry Met Sally… and Four Weddings and a Funeral, complete with every imaginable stumbling block that could keep its leads apart, from controlling girlfriends (Tamsin Egerton and Suki Waterhouse) to unfortunate flight delays to (yes) multiple weddings and even a funeral.
Clearly, there’s romantic-comedy potential in this situation, since variations on it have been done before—and far, far better in, for example, Four Weddings and a Funeral and My Best Friend’s Wedding.
Much of the blame has to rest with Juliette Towhidi (Calendar Girls), whose screenplay based on Cecelia Ahern’s bestseller Where Rainbows End, fails to do much beyond playing second fiddle to Four Weddings and A Funeral.
Updating My Best Friend's Wedding for the millennial set, director Christian Ditter's Love, Rosie casts a winsome Lily Collins in what might once have been Julia Roberts's role (think eyebrows, not teeth) — though in this case, marriage is no real obstacle to true love.
Clearly, there’s romantic-comedy potential in this situation, since variations on it have been done before—and far, far better in, for example, Four Weddings and a Funeral and My Best Friend’s Wedding.
Instead, he heads to Harvard while she winds up holding the baby (not his), paving the way for umpteen airport dashes, missed connections and predictable Four Weddings/My Best Friend’s Wedding showdowns.
Collins actually evokes that film’s lead, Anne Hathaway, in her porcelain physicality and warmly klutzy comic persona; even the appearance on the soundtrack of K.T. Tunstall’s “Suddenly I See,” the song that introduced Hathaway’s breakout turn in “The Devil Wears Prada,” seems calculated to forge the connection.
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Love, Rosie is a comedy of errors in the vein of When Harry Met Sally… and Four Weddings and a Funeral, complete with every imaginable stumbling block that could keep its leads apart, from controlling girlfriends (Tamsin Egerton and Suki Waterhouse) to unfortunate flight delays to (yes) multiple weddings and even a funeral.
A predictable comedy about missed connections and misplaced affections, Love, Rosie squanders the talents of engaging leads Lily Collins (Snow White in Mirror Mirror) and Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games franchise’s Finnick Odair ).
Director Christian Ditter opts for close-ups as the movie's default mode, and although Collins ("The Mortal Instruments") and Claflin ("The Hunger Games" movies) hold the screen exceptionally well, the camera's persistent intimacy suggests that what's unfolding is a melodrama of monumental proportions and not a flimsy rom-com.
It’s enough to make any rom-com fan ache for talk-heavy genre offerings like You’ve Got Mail, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless In Seattle, which allowed their characters to actually get to know each other as they fall in love.
But Love, Rosie isn’t really kind of romantic comedy given to big declarations of love, which at least effectively jettisons overwrought cinematic troupes like the tried-and-true “run through an airport” scheme (hard to do with current aviation securities in place) or the perpetually popular “break up a wedding” scene (which has only ever worked in The Graduate, and even then to questionable results).
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Ditter demonstrated his aptitude for broad comedy in his 2006 debut, “French for Beginners,” though he doesn’t always hit the right note here: A disastrous condom-related accident that ushers in a key plot development is wince-inducingly frank and funny, but a later comic setpiece involving S&M handcuffs seems awkwardly imported from a more heightened bedroom romp.
Ditter has made a handful of popular comedies (The Crocodiles, French for Beginners) in Germany, and while he’s able to maintain a certain rhythm and polish, there’s ultimately nothing in Love, Rosie that distinguishes it much from your average in-flight movie.