Professor Richard Haig lives in the shadow of his father in the lightweight romantic comedy Lessons In Love. The elder Haig was a renowned Cambridge don in the swinging 60s, who railed against the academic establishment in his lectures and lured his female students to bed in his off time. Now Richard lives a life of similar collegiate hedonism, albeit in a 21st-century context where the seediness of such a lifestyle isn’t mitigated by the film’s rose-tinted view of the past.
The casting of Pierce Brosnan as Richard, then, is surely no coincidence. Like his character, Brosnan’s identity is entirely overshadowed by an antiquated lothario with whom he’s become closely associated. Like all former Bonds, any part he takes on can never hope to eclipse his turn as the world’s most obnoxious superspy – a fact that must be frustrating and freeing in equal measure. On the one hand, every role becomes filtered through a performance he last gave in 2002. On the other, all the residual goodwill from the Bond years allows him to get away with things for which we’d crucify other actors.
In the case of Lessons In Love, that means we’ll accept him in a role clearly written for a younger man (Malcolm McDowell, who’s less than 10 years older than Brosnan, plays his father) and won’t blame him for the film’s myriad failings, chief among them a dazzlingly inane plotline in which our hero splits from Jessica Alba and shacks up with a woman closer to his own age – Salma Hayek, still 13 years his junior.
Somehow, these tired Hollywood tropes don’t inspire anger when it’s Brosnan acting them out. If anything, there’s something pitiable about a sexagenarian going through the motions of his younger days for an audience of rapidly diminishing mass. Because away from the bright lights and the blockbuster budgets, the hollowness of Lessons In Love reveals how little substance there ever was in the archetype that Brosnan has built a career upon.
Also out this week
Spy Melissa McCarthy foils a nuclear plot
Self/less Ben Kingsley puts his brain in the body of Ryan Reynolds
Brand: A Second Coming Russell Brand showboats for acclaimed film-maker Ondi Timoner
