The problem with Issue films is that the Issue tends to take over, warping plot, characters, and artistic execution into forms that serve an agenda without expressing any form of reality. A Love Divided, a based-on-a-true-story weepie about a family torn apart by religious strife in 1950s Ireland, struggles dutifully against this syndrome, but eventually gets sucked down anyway. Liam Cunningham and Orla Brady star as an Irish couple who express deep adoration for each other mostly via heartfelt looks and swelling, schmaltzy music, right up until it's time for the elder of their two daughters to enroll in parochial school. Brady, a Protestant, was allowed to marry her Catholic husband in a Catholic church because they agreed to send their children to a Catholic parochial school. But the town priest's casual assumption that she'll live up to that agreement rubs Brady the wrong way, and she balks at the last minute, though with no clear goal in mind. Insisting that the girls' education is a matter for her and her husband to debate, she nevertheless belittles everything Cunningham says on the matter, even accusing him of hiding behind his daughters' skirts when he dares bring up the subject of what might be best for the children. Feeling he's failed her by not imitating her abrupt, vaguely conceived rebellion, Brady leaves town with the girls in tow. In her absence, Cunningham becomes an erratically temperamental zombie, while the Catholic priest (a convincing but cartoonishly written Tony Doyle) of their small, idealized farm village whips his flock into a furious state of religious bigotry while trying to make the stupefied local Protestants reveal Brady's location. As the situation escalates, Cunningham and Brady—neither of whom actually espouses any sort of belief system, apart from their Hallmark-card devotion to each other—are each turned into icons in an increasingly ugly and violent small-scale war that strongly recalls a bucolic, Irish-accented version of Citizen Ruth. TV director Sydney Macartney and screenwriter Stuart Hepburn win points for acknowledging that even simplistic, starry-eyed love can't necessarily conquer all, but in most other cases, they fall flat. A Love Divided's characters morph from beaming, Disney-esque rustics into a shillelagh-wielding mob with whiplash-inducing, hard-to-swallow speed, while Cunningham and Brady bring dignity but little sympathy to their cardboard-cutout roles. It's significant that the best scenes, and the best acting by far, come from two outsiders (stiff-necked Scottish martinet Eileen Pollock and unapologetic atheist Peter Caffrey), whose primary function in the obvious, connect-the-dots script is to order Cunningham and Brady to get over themselves and just reconcile, already.