Love Actually

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Love Actually is a gift of holiday hope from the well-worn pen and virgin lens of the film world's sappiest living true believer in all things romantic -- Richard Curtis. It is familiar and manipulative, clichéd and predictable, cloying and implausible, and utterly, heartwarmingly, endearing (getting by, I think, on the filmmaker's honestly imperturbable optimism -- with a little help from its friends, pop rock and roll).

Curtis sets the film up as counterpoint to the claim he claims to hear: that the world is filled with hatred. He offers as exhibit number one an airport arrivals gate on any day, at any time -- all hugs, kisses and tears. Love in many shapes and styles. It is a persuasive, if not truly representative moment, and though not quite felt in the fingers or toes, it does prepare one to be warmed. As exhibit two, however, Curtis almost derails the film with a terribly miscalculated reference: the substance of the final phone calls from the hijacked planes that hit the Twin Towers. A casual throw-away line that feels like an act of trivialization, it adds nothing and takes away much. It chilled me, and bothers me still.

But soon we move past that and on to the vignettes that make up the film: stories of love new, old, longed for, tempted, fantasized, disappointed, unrequited, mourned, fresh, unanticipated, undeterred, inspired, bold and shy -- across classes, races, age limits, language barriers, oceans and airport security -- between lovers, friends, siblings, parents and children. The cast is nearly the romantic comedy equivalent of the upstairs-downstairs players list in Robert Altman's Gosford Park: a good run of the best (mostly) British talent available for the genre.

Hugh Grant plays a Prime Minister with an inappropriate eye for a saucy servant (Martine McCutcheon); Liam Neeson and Thomas Sangster play a father and stepson dealing with loss and love; Laura Linney is an office worker with a not-so-secret crush (Rodrigo Santoro); Alan Rickman is an employer with a practical wife (Emma Thompson) and a provocative secretary (Heike Makatsch); Colin Firth is a novelist who is best understood by a non-English speaking employee (Lucia Moniz); Keira Knightley is a woman who marries one of two good friends (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Andrew Lincoln), Kris Marshall is a London loser with a firm belief in the American dream girl, and Martin Freeman and Joanna Page are movie stand-ins who find each other beneath the surface.

An amalgam of nine love stories that (like their characters) come up against each other briefly, but don't exactly intertwine, Love Actually is anchored by the story of an unexpectedly revivified veteran rocker (Bill Nighy) and run through by a true leitmotif. With a reference both self-mocking and self-righteous, somehow, the film title itself is an elliptically emphatic version of the theme song that highlighted Curtis's 1994 hit, Four Weddings and a Funeral, and that comically snakes through this relentlessly upbeat reiteration. Love Actually is short for "Love (ACTUALLY) is all around." A modified cover of the old Troggs, later Wet Wet Wet hit is repeatedly, variably, always badly, never convincingly, more and more outrageously, performed by Nighy's irrepressible alter-ego, Billy Mack, in his quest to be number one on Christmas day. When the film opens, that day is five weeks away.

The storylines that unfold in those weeks are not all equally up to the task. Sometimes the tone shifts too awkwardly from drama to farce -- or there is not enough space between the subtle and the broad. Sometimes the humor is a bit mean-spirited (fat jokes seem to appeal to Curtis) -- or sentimentality stands in for sympathy. Sometimes Curtis confuses politics with playfulness (Hugh Grant is a pseudo-Blair with a built-in corrector device -- Billy Bob Thornton is the American President without the Sorkin touch). Sometimes resolution comes too easily. Sometimes the closure offered is not enough. But, sometimes, too, the film offers moments truly wonderful.

Rickman and Thompson are both superb, the quality of their performances remarkable in the short bursts allowed them, with Thompson surprisingly moving in scenes that might have played as pro forma. Linney brings depth to lines less than perfectly written, to a character less than fully developed (and somewhat, I think, misunderstood). Neeson and Sangster create a complexly real relationship within a plotline that reaches into the Hollywood absurd. Lincoln brings substance to a saccharine moment with the look in his eyes. Firth and Grant are deliciously themselves (the one achingly reserved, the other adorably diffident). Curtis favorite Rowan Atkinson passes among the characters for a quick interlude, creating humor in tension without losing pace. And Nighy, divinely, decadently, scene-stealingly over the top brings it all together with a turn that is perfectly timed and toned.

The theme song cover also lends a needed edge to the schmaltzy soundtrack -- which works, but is (alas) almost too embarrassing to list out. Suffice it to say that it includes a requisite Risky Business riff -- Prime Minister alone at home -- and a syrupy Beach Boys topping off.

A chick flick? Perhaps. The men are to die for, the situations to ooh and ohhh about. Or perhaps it is best intended for those with a tooth for sweets. But if there's something to believe in this year for the holidays, it might as well be love. Even if it isn't all around, and isn't all we need or want for Christmas, god only knows what we'd do without it.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene