Love Actually
Written and directed
by Richard Curtis
Starring Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Colin Firth, Liam Neeson, Laura Linney and Bill Nighy
Classification: 14A
Rating: **½
Love Actually is long, actually. Romantic comedies don't usually run in excess of two hours, though a quick glance at the cast of this homage to love British-style will offer a clue to the reason for its length. With a bevy of stars, and almost as many sub-plots, this is a sprawling multipart narrative, a really nice version of Robert Altman's Shortcuts, but set in a Christmas-decorated London, with a lot of sensitive, good-humoured blokes and birds. Our narrator, at least at the beginning, is that popular English toast master Hugh Grant, here playing Britain's newly elected, bachelor Prime Minister. With these word, he provides an overture to the film: "General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. Seems to me that love is everywhere." The rest of the movie is an illustration of that point.
Hugh, for example, no sooner walks into 10 Downing St. than he is smitten by the girl who serves him tea (Martine McCutcheon). She says rude words when she's nervous, which happens to be whenever she's around our rakishly rumpled head of state.
A recently widowed stepfather (Liam Neeson) is trying to unlock the key to his son's solitude -- and discovers his son is in love. A lonely executive, Harry (Alan Rickman), encourages his American employee, Sarah (Laura Linney), to make a move on the man she has a crush on (Rodrigo Santoro), because everyone in the office is getting bored with the waiting game.
Meanwhile, Harry's struggling with the advances of his sexy secretary (Heike Makatsch), though he has been married many years to Karen (Emma Thompson). Karen happens to be a best friend of Neeson's character, and the sister of the Prime Minister.
Who have we left out? Oh, yes. Colin Firth. After discovering his wife in bed with his brother, a novelist (Colin Firth) heads off to a cottage in the south of France to write. There, he falls in love with his Portuguese cleaning lady (Lucia Moniz), though neither can speak the other's language. Meanwhile, a new bride, Keira Knightley, realizes that the best friend (Andrew Lincoln) of her husband (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is acting rude to her because he's secretly in love with her. Then there's a food caterer who wants to go to America where he's sure all the girls will love his English accent; and a couple of shy pornographic film performers that start to fall in love; and a washed-up rock star, Billy Mack (a very funny Bill Nighy, in full Keith Richards's tilt), who is "looking for a comeback at any price" and has just recorded a sappy Christmas version of the old Troggs hit Love Is All Around.
The last time that song was used in a hit movie was Four Weddings and a Funeral, which has more than a slight resemblance to Love Actually. Richard Curtis, who makes his directorial debut with this film, wrote the milestone British hit Four Weddings, and left a large imprint on British television and cinema in the last decade. From such television shows as Not the Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder and Mr. Bean, he went on to write The Tall Guy, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones' Diary.
As might be guessed, Love Actually is a similar blend of unabashed sentimentality, sharp verbal play and dry wit. There are also, typical of Curtis's scripts, a string of set-piece scenes -- a wedding and a funeral, a news conference where the British PM gives the philandering American president (Billy Bob Thornton) a piece of his mind and, of course, a children's Christmas pageant.
Most of the best scenes, though, are between just two characters. Alan Rickman plays the impatient husband who is trying to buy a gift for his mistress before his wife arrives. Rowan Atkinson plays the perfectionist clerk who insists on giving him the most beautifully wrapped gift ever. There's another fine dramatic scene between Rickman and Thompson, when these two familiar veterans, handle the delicate business of a marital disappointment that no one wants to turn into a permanent rift.
Because Love Actually is, for the most part, shamelessly warm-hearted and positive, it seems curmudgeonly to find fault with it, but there is a problem with the ratio of size to quality. There are, perhaps, a half-dozen solid laughs among the many plots and a couple of genuine emotional moments. The film would probably improve by losing two entire stories (the food caterer, the porn stars). Overall, it pushes its "love is good" message with such insistence, so many cheery pop tunes, airport hugs, coincidences and teary smiles, that it feels like one long commercial. Surely love is a desirable enough commodity that it doesn't require such a hard sell.