For Your Love
Richard Curtis’ latest romantic comedy lays it on a little thick while courting the audience’s affection
by Noel Murray
Love Actually
Dir. Richard Curtis
R, 135 min.
Opens Friday
Even people who enjoy Richard Curtis’ hodgepodge ensemble romance Love Actually will probably concede that at times it’s too much to take. Curtis made his reputation as the house screenwriter for Working Title Films, penning popular upscale Britcoms like Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’ Diary. He makes his directorial debut with Love Actually and sets out to make nothing less than the frothiest, most ambitious romantic comedy of all time, juggling about 10 plotlines plus a Christmas theme in an attempt to leave no audience heart unwarmed.
Instead, Love Actually’s introductory scenes are so boisterously, forcefully ingratiating that they might drive some folks out of the theater. Curtis makes every piece of dialogue a zinger, piling topper line on top of topper line (most of them predictable) while parading his stars: Hugh Grant as a British prime minister in love with his aide; Alan Rickman as a married magazine publisher in love with his secretary; Laura Linney as one of Rickman’s writers, in love with a co-worker; Colin Firth as a novelist in love with his maid; and Liam Neeson as a recent widower whose preteen son is in love with a classmate. Throw in Emma Thompson as Rickman’s wife (and Grant’s sister), Bill Nighy as an over-the-hill rocker angling for a fluke hit with a treacly Christmas reworking of “Love Is All Around” and—well, it just goes on and on.
Curtis drops people in and out of the film without any apparent artistic rationale, and the individual dilemmas range from the cloying to the silly. He also fails to satisfactorily wrap up about half of his stories, and—as is frequently the case with Working Title productions—the coolly flustered maneuverings of cute, comfortably well-off Brits begs for an invasion by the cast of a Mike Leigh film, who could teach these well-meaning twits a thing or two about real suffering.
Love Actually finds a good groove once Curtis stops trying to delight every damn second and figures out what kind of fantasy he’s really spinning. The clarification occurs somewhere between the scene where Grant tells off a U.S. president and the scene where a happy-go-lucky cater-waiter visits the states and scores with corn-fed supermodels. That’s when Love Actually defines its vision of a pristine, snowglobe United Kingdom, where everyone is fab and citizens take pride in their indigenous culture.
As far back as Four Weddings and a Funeral’s Partridge Family-derived pickup lines, Curtis has shown an ability to elucidate the richer meaning of dopey pop. He gets his own perfect pop moment late in Love Actually, when Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson share a sibling embrace and thereby make a symbolic affirmation of all things good about this kind of movie—a distinctly British kind, tasteful even in its raunchiness. The film then steams toward what promises to be an orgy of happy endings, in a finale so giddy that the audience may miss the fact that not all the endings are happy ones. The illusion of joy emerges from the mounting evidence that Curtis’ heart is in every frame of his movie—even Nighy’s awful Christmas song. It’s hard not to acquiesce to his belief in this genre, these actors, and his understanding that cheap sentiment can be as effective as the real stuff.
Comments (0)