Starring: Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, and Liam Neeson
Running Time: 128 minutes
Rating: R
Love Actually begins with interposed cuts of people greeting each other at airports. Hugh Grant’s voice tells us that in spite of all the hatred and ugliness, he believes that, “Love actually, is all around us.” Now to a hard-bitten, cold-nosed cynic such as myself this is utterly unbelievable. It’s one of those statements that you hear, roll your eyes to, and put away in your memory to use whenever you get the urge to make fun of those smiling, happy people you see everyday. But there is something about this movie that destroyed the cynic in me for at least two hours. I don’t know what it is, but it’s irresistable.
The movie, after this collection of shots, goes into a revolving door of some 10 stories of love. But they are not just all simple boy-meets-girl stories with predictable endings. While one may be as simplistic as that, others aren’t. It is five weeks before Christmas as these stories begin to converge. The prime minister (Hugh Grant) who falls in love with the woman who brings him
Or if all those stories seemed a little male-centric, there’s a woman (Laura Linney) who is trying to bring herself to talk to a co-worker she’s had a crush on for nearly three years. Maybe you need a dash of the farcical. Will a Brit who moves to Wisconsin because he thinks the ladies there will fall in love with his accent be enough? For the cynic in you that gags at the thought of all this affection, there’s the aging rocker (Bill Nighy) who seems to realize that his newest sing le (a re-recording of one of his earlier classics substituting the word “Christmas” for “love”) is a blatant money grab. Note I have not even mentioned the man and woman who are getting to know each other while in the buff shooting stand-in scenes for a movie.
All this is done in a rather interesting, interlocking manner. For example, Laura Linney’s boss is Alan Rickman who is married to Emma Thompson who is Hugh Grant’s sister. While seemingly head-scratching, this is a nice, natural way to give form and shape to the story. There is only one story that doesn’t quite work (a man who, seemingly, is finding it hard to let go to the past as his best friend gets married) and that is because it just seems unimportant compared to the other stories. Its resolution is also rather anticlimactic. This is perhaps the only false note of the movie.
As you may have noticed, I have not named any of the characters because the individuals aren’t really that important; they could almost all be seen as archetypes: girl next door, scorned boyfriend, wide-eyed kid, or aging rocker. What Richard Curtis, the writer/director is going for is merely the theme of love and its ability to conquer everything or at least be an important part in one’s life and he succeeds admirably.
Curtis is not new to this territory being the writer for such classic romantic comedies as Bridget Jones’s Diary and Four Weddings and a Funeral, but this is an excellent debut for him as a director. I really thought Robert Altman (Gosford Park) was the only director capable of handling a large cast, but Curtis may have proved me wrong. With only 12 to 13 minutes to spend with each story, I still felt an interest in each story unfolding before me. The script is also snappy and provides some real zingers, primarily for Nighy’s rocker. When telling kids not to do drugs, he pauses and says, “Become a rock star; they’ll give ‘em to ya for free.”
Of course, there is always the danger that with a plot like this and such a universal theme as love, the acting and characterization will fall prey to story conventions. But the cast assembled is far too good for that. The real standouts are Thompson and Rickman as the married couple, Colin Firth as a jilted lover finding love with a Portugese housemaid he can’t even speak to, and Bill Nighy as the Keith Richards-like rocker whose epiphany towards the end is surprisingly touching. Grant, Neeson, and Linney are all reliable as well. Those of you looking for your Keira Knightley fix after Bend It Like Beckham will have to look somewhere else; hers is the aforementioned plotline that doesn’t work, though not really to her fault.
I have not gone in depth about how each story unfolds because I do not wish to give away too much. A good amount of the joy to be had in this movie comes from watching each story evolve and connect, sometimes surprisingly, with another. So does everything end happily? Well, in a movie as light as this, you might be surprised. We are given happy endings for many of the characters we have come to care about, but there are a couple that are striking in how real they are, and how completely bittersweet. One of the women’s stories (I won’t be any more particular) is so sad that it threatens to bring the whole of the movie down with it. But in the end, you leave the theatre smiling convinced that love may be waiting for you around the corner. In a world as ugly as this one, even I left the theatre like that. Now that’s one powerful movie.