Love, Rosie movie review & film summary (2015)

Director Christian Ditter offers some artful touches in adapting Cecelia Ahern’s novel “Where Rainbows End.” The lighting is often quite lovely, for example—streaks of late-afternoon sunshine in a park, or lamplight filling a darkened bedroom. But for every delicate element there are many others that are heavy-handed or cringe-inducing, including some painfully on-the-nose musical selections. (Salt-N-Pepa’s perky “Push It” plays while Collins’ character, Rosie, is giving birth. Get it? Because she’s pushing!)

But the tonal transition that occurs before that scene—from a sweet and quiet moment of Rosie bonding with her sizable bump to the noisy wackiness of her screaming through delivery—is reflective of the kind of jarring shifts that often make this movie so uneven.

The script from Juliette Towhidi begins in the present day, with Rosie making a speech at a wedding, then flashes back to reveal the lifelong friendship she’s shared with Claflin’s Alex. The two have been inseparable since they were 5 years old; then at Rosie’s 18th birthday, they briefly (and drunkenly) kissed after too many tequila shots. The spark is clearly there.

But in the ensuing years, each has managed to become involved with other people who are just as clearly wrong for them. These aren’t just ill-advised dalliances—they’re aggressively bad picks, depleting the film of even the slightest shred of tension as to its outcome. Alex has a penchant for vapid, leggy blondes. Rosie romps with her thoughtless, pretty-boy prom date and winds up pregnant after a condom mishap.

And here’s one of the many places where “Love, Rosie” takes a detour into territory that isn’t just distractingly unbelievable; it’s downright stupid. Rather than tell her best friend that she’s expecting, Rosie keeps this information from Alex because she’s afraid it will prevent him from heading to Harvard to study medicine. Or something. Boston was their shared dream (she’d planned to study hotel management at Boston College—although she also mentions Boston University, which is an entirely different place) but now he’ll have to go alone while she secretly changes diapers. They grew up across the street from each other in an insular neighborhood; the notion that he wouldn’t find out she has a baby is absurd. But whatever. We need to move on—there are so many other problems here.

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