Well unlucky me. It's the middle of June, about as far away from Christmas as one can get and I am not in love. This means I have to wait six months before I can profess my love to the man of dreams and he will come rushing into my arms, or so this film claims. With a sickly sweetness that makes your teeth hurt, "Love Actually" is a profession of the goodness of mankind, with about 30,000 interconnecting plots culminating in love for all. Thus is the magic of Christmas. It is common knowledge that everyone will reciprocate the love should we be brave enough to shout it aloud, and the birth of Jesus appears to be that magic moment in which all of the United Kingdom seems to be doing so. I don't buy it for a second.
The cliches are unending and despite the wink-nudge given to the viewer I expect that deep down writer/director Richard Curtis believes what he is dishing out, only mixing it with cheese and corn to save face. The end result is something that is undeniably charming, but as we all hope the boy gets the girl in spite of self-inflicted setbacks, the inevitable happy endings come nearly bittersweet. A little bit more heartache, a little bit more humanity, a little bit more realism would have suited me better. After all, building up false hope is an ugly thing to do as an artist.
I would try and outline the basic plot, but there are so many that I find in reviewing my notes that I can't recall half of the characters or their stories. Some were so irrelevant that I very nearly skipped ahead to a relationship with actual substance. Others that were deeply involving received shamefully little screen time, and a few of the "central" stories were so uninteresting despite their relevance that I began to get irritated.
Let's examine a few.
I would have to pick Hugh Grant's story as the main plot--or at least the one with the most minutes on the screen. He plays the Prime Minister of the UK (highly suspect) who falls head over heals in love with his frumpy, foul-mouthed, East End secretary. He decides that he can't have her about if he feels so mad about her so he lets her go. At least, this is the story he tells himself. One afternoon he walks in on her and the President of the United States (a piercing Billy Bob Thornton) kissing in a drawing room. It is shortly after this that he sacks her and delivers a powerful speech claiming that the UK and the US are no longer close friends. Now, right there is a movie in itself. The balance of power on the world stage being dictated by the jealousy of a man in charge could have been very interesting, and yet the plot was dropped and we never saw Thornton again. It all revolved a silly, pointless romance of a silly, pointless man.
A second major story is the marriage of Harry and Karen (Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson). She suspects that Harry has been cheating on her with his colleague and she or may not be right. On Christmas Eve their marriage practically falls apart. The two of them, especially Thompson, give powerful performances, but the aftermath is left so muddied that I felt disgustingly short-changed.
The last large narrative is possibly the one that I found most endearing (at least of the three), though their running joke became tiresome after a while. Colin Firth plays a writer who moves into a villa for a month to write a new novel and ends up falling for his Portuguese housekeeper. Neither can understand a word that the other says, but through subtitles we learn that they have the same thoughts and are, indeed, soul mates. It is lovely to have a plot about love crossing language barriers and their end was cute.
Right there we have possibly two and a half films. Now, add another seven or so and you have this film. The difficulty that I experienced in watching this was not the writing or acting. The former was sappy but well written, the latter was excellent (if you have been following some of the names you might have guessed. Others include Keira Knightley, Bill Nighy, Liam Neeson and Rowan Atkinson to name a few). What was the issue that I found myself becoming involved in a story when two minutes later it would switch to two characters without any sort of personality and their plotless story. It became nearly impossible to establish any sort of connection with the people on the screen which made me numb to any sort of heartache or reconciliation.
Three stories did interest me. The first is one listed above, the failing marriage. The second is Bill Nighy's, as a has-been rock star trying to make a late-in-life come back hit with a terrible Christmas song. The third was about a lovely, but lonely young woman who has been desperately pining after a man in her office. When he expresses an interest in her he finds that she cannot give him the affection they both deserve as she tends to very sick brother. The conflict between two loves, the man and the family, is terribly upsetting but, like so much of the film, incomplete.
If I were to have made this film I would have chosen three of the most promising stories and would have been faithful to the true nature of love. The is so much that I could rail about with regards to this Christmas magic and Curtis's optimism, but I won't as this is a Christmas film full of holiday cheer. However, his lack of imagination and his unfair treatment of his material should not go completely unpunished. I did enjoy myself, and I hated myself for doing so. It is a dirty trick to play with emotions so completely especially when what we are watching is undeniably forced and fake.
If you want a film to cuddle up to somebody with--probably someone you haven't know too terribly long--then take a stab at it. For the rest of us who want something substantive and wholly interesting I think you might do better someplace else.
2/4
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