‘Love’ quickly loses its way

“It’s All About Love” is a big, bad movie that could be made only by a major talent. It has scope, it has style, it has Claire Danes and Joaquin Phoenix as gorgeous star-crossed-lovers -- and it has an abundance of stupefying silliness.

Its director/co-writer is Thomas Vinterberg, the Danish maestro of the Dogma credo whose 1998 “The Celebration,” a coruscating confrontation between adult children and their secretly corrupt father, was a prize-winning international success. But Vinterberg has thrown the discipline of Dogma, with its strict but stimulating principles, to the winds to make a swooning romantic thriller set against an impending climactic apocalypse.

Phoenix’s John, apparently Polish-born but raised in the U.S., is on a business trip to Calgary when he stops over in New York so that his long estranged wife, Elena (Danes), a Polish figure-skating superstar, can sign divorce papers. They meet at her Manhattan hotel, where she has a suite fit for royalty and a retinue to match. Elena is nonchalant, but once she and John are alone, she begs him to stay because she’s in trouble but doesn’t want to spell it out. Because the mutual attraction is still strong and because John is a gentleman, how can he refuse?

As it happens the year is 2021, and the global climate is going haywire, causing Ugandans to fly like birds. (Near the film’s end Vinterberg provides an unfortunate image of Ugandans floating in the air, secured by cords to the Earth.) Meanwhile, New Yorkers are getting used to stepping over the occasional corpse in public places. No one has been able to figure out what causes these deaths; there’s speculation that they are heart failures because of loneliness and lack of love.

As for Elena, far from being a queen with many attendants, she is their prisoner, and for suitably nefarious reasons her life is in danger. Pretty soon she and John are on the run, only to Brooklyn, however, for a romantic idyll, when they should be trying to put as much distance between themselves and Elena’s would-be captors as possible. In the meantime John’s older brother Marciello (Sean Penn, sporting a thick Polish accent) is on an interminable airplane flight philosophizing about life, love and death, occasionally sharing his thoughts with John via cellphone.

“It’s All About Love” recalls Stanley Kubrick’s superior “Eyes Wide Shut” because it’s also potentially a taut, unpretentious thriller set in a disembodied New York and rattling around in a grandiose production that is out of scale for the material. Had “It’s All About Love” been made 17 years ago instead of being set 17 years in the future it might have succeeded as a love versus politics thriller commenting on the dire plight of star athletes in then-Iron Curtain countries.

In other words the film’s slightly surreal, somewhat sci-fi plot does not connect with Vinterberg’s concerns for the planet. It’s clear that Vinterberg is striving to create an allegory that will express his fears for the survival of mankind and his belief that people have forgotten that love is important. But this foolish saga, soggy with sentimentality and rife with improbability, suggests that at this early stage of his career Vinterberg is not ready to discard the discipline of Dogma.

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‘It’s All About Love’

MPAA rating: Rated R for a scene of strong violence, some language and sexuality

Times guidelines: Complicated adult themes and situations plus violence unsuitable for children

Joaquin Phoenix...John

Claire Danes...Elena

Sean Penn...Marciello

Douglas Henshall...Michael

Alun Armstrong...David

A Strand release of a Nimbus Film International presentation. Director Thomas Vinterberg. Producer Birgitte Haid. Executive producers Lars Bredo Rahbek, Bo Ehrhardt, Paul Webster, Peter Aalbaek Jensenaul Webster. Screenplay by Vinterberg & Mogens Kukov. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. Visual effects supervisor Peter Hjorth. Music Zbigniew Preisner. Costumes Ellen Lens. Production designer Ben Van Os. Art director Jette Lehmann. Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes.

Exclusively at the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, (323) 848-3500.