British screenwriter (and now director too) Richard Curtis had a notable hit with Four Weddings and a Funeral — the only major flaw of which was its attempt to convince us that there is anything appealing about Andie MacDowell.
Having helped make Hugh Grant an international star, Curtis went on to write Notting Hill, which attracted the talents of Julia Roberts and showed that romantic comedy didn’t have to be 100% slush; you could get away with about 60%.
Now, in Love Actually, his directorial debut, Curtis gives us — as if to remind us of his first big success — a wedding and a funeral within the first ten minutes. He is setting out his stall, harking back to the movie that made him famous and also acquainting us with the multitude of characters that make up the nine separate storylines of this multi-story movie, a sort of Britishified Altman style without the nihilism.
The cream of British acting talent is on display. We have the uxorious, cuckolded writer played by Colin Firth; the recently widowed Liam Neeson; the ageing couple played by Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman, their marriage pulling apart. There’s the young man looking for true love, and the young man who’s in love with the wrong person. Oh, and there’s Grant as the newly elected prime minister — a prime minister who is, amazingly, still single. How on earth did he get elected? Surely nowadays no one without a supportive spouse smiling vacantly in the background makes it past the earliest selection committees? Why, the voters might think he’s a poof.
The Grant/PM strand is in fact both one of the funniest of the movie’s parallel narratives, and its weakest — perhaps even for the same reason. It’s the least realistically credible part of the movie, so Curtis can take liberties for the sake of humour. The only storyline that is funnier than Grant’s, and in fact the least conventionally romantic strand, has Bill Nighy as a washed-up rock star desperately whoring his way back up to the top of the charts.
But Grant as PM — however amusing he is — nearly sinks the movie. He makes it hard for us to believe in any of the other characters, except perhaps by way of contrast. In comparison, they almost seem dourly kitchen-sink.
The jokey, far-too-young (not to mention handsome) Grant in Number 10 Downing Street might be a good idea for a sitcom, but he’s a British wish-fulfillment fantasy likely to make anyone else shake his or her non-British head in bewilderment. How PM Grant manages to stand up to the American president, played by Billy Bob Thornton as a kind of George W Bush with some slight hint of intelligence, is unfathomable. Almost as unfathomable as a George W Bush with some slight hint of intelligence. Grant just doesn’t have the gravitas, and he’s not given anything else to say or do that would persuade us he does. We keep expecting his jingoistic speech, in the face of the American president, to devolve upon a joke — and then we’re left, as his supporters cheer, wondering where the punchline went.
Other parts of the movie work better, though, and Curtis has a knack for swift, telling scenes that end on an amusing (though not always uplifting) note. We zip between storylines, and the whole is set against the run-up to Christmas — just to add some tension to the plot, presumably.
The closer we get to Christmas Day, though, the more Love Actually loses its comic edge and slumps into sentimentality. I suppose that should have been expected. The “actually” of the title hints at a very British kind of humour; the echo of the Pet Shop Boys’ wry take on love and pop (they called an album Actually) is surely intentional. Curtis should know that it helps to add a little more lime to the sugar. But the fact that the movie’s trajectory heads for a school concert at its climax should also alert one to the possibility that, despite Grant’s speech, a sort of Americanism has taken over. The movie will not only be sentimental at the close, but triumphally so.
It’s a pity that Love Actually goes soft and cops out. And it’s a pity, too, and perhaps indicative of its willingness to avoid the trickier questions it raises, that the two most interesting storylines are left dangling. Perhaps Curtis just had too many narrative balls in the air. The obvious endings are given to the obvious couples; that’s romantic comedy for you. As for a little more human complexity and unpredictability, despite the hints that Curtis could have done it, for that you’ll have to try another movie altogether.