Love Actually
Richard Curtis (2003)
It’s amazing how a feelgood film can get you feeling hate towards (just about) everyone involved in it – including the people who enjoy it: it’s just as well that we watched Love Actually on DVD rather than at the cinema. The picture begins with shots of people meeting and hugging each other at an airport terminal; Hugh Grant’s voiceover explains that, whenever he gets gloomy about the state of the world, he thinks of scenes like this and is reminded that the messages left by people who died in planes on 9/11 were expressions of love for those closest to them. This proves to the speaker that, ‘Actually, love really is all around us’ (or words to that effect). I knew Hugh Grant was playing the British prime minister and so, as soon as I heard his voice, I thought the speech must be ironic: Grant can’t sound anything but insincere and I wrongly assumed that the film would regard anything issuing from the mouth of a political leader to be fake too. So the voiceover delivers a double whammy: first the shock of 9/11 being mentioned in this context when you expect the monologue to be heading for a punchline that reveals its falsity; then the realisation that the voice of Grant really means what it says and that this is the theme of the film we’re about to see. When Grant burbled about love being all around, I thought it was a bit self-indulgent of Richard Curtis to refer to the old Troggs song which, covered by Wet Wet Wet, was a smash hit as the theme for Four Weddings and a Funeral. I’d massively underestimated Curtis’s nerve: the song becomes a centrepiece of Love Actually. After the Grant prologue, Curtis cuts to a studio where an aging, has-been rocker Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) is making a Christmas single – a version of ‘Love Is All Around’ with the word ‘Christmas’ replacing ‘love’. Billy breaks off from singing to say that the record is ‘shit, isn’t it?’ and his daft-looking manager (Gregor Fisher) smilingly agrees: ‘Yep, solid gold shite’. All in all, this is quite an opening – breathtaking, disorienting in its smug self-esteem.
It’s soon clear that Love Actually – set in contemporary London in the weeks leading up to Christmas (there’s a promotional feel to the shots of famous landmarks) – is going to be a series of parallel love stories and the moral-of-the-story announced by Grant at the beginning makes it obvious that things will work out fine. In a fairytale romantic comedy like Working Girl, your confidence that all will end well doesn’t at all dilute the suspense of getting there. You’re anxious for the Melanie Griffith character to succeed – part of the fun of the film is laughing at yourself for worrying whether she’ll get what she wants, both sexually and professionally. In Love Actually there’s no such pressure in any of the strands of the story. Ramifying from the central conceit (very much the operative word) of recycling ‘Love Is All Around’ are other self-references (like the cross-cutting between scenes of a wedding and a funeral) – or references to what the performers have done elsewhere (like the writer played by Colin Darcy Firth diving into a lake after his manuscript and the Portuguese home help he fancies). More than one of the comic ‘highlights’ here depend on things being funny per se, regardless of their context. Thinking himself alone in Downing Street late one evening, the bachelor Prime Minister starts grooving to dance music on the radio. This is supposed to be a laugh – the Prime Minister grooving – even though Hugh Grant hasn’t behaved remotely like anyone’s idea of a prime minister up to this point so there’s no comic payoff to the routine. Billy Mack seems to make his shite Christmas single a hit by going on television and radio and telling interviewers how bad it is. (You can believe that might be an effective selling technique.) Yet when he’s contacted with the news that it’s the Christmas number one and it starts playing, Billy speaks away from the phone to say to the people he’s with, ‘Not this crap again’ – when the DJ on the other end of the line would surely be expecting Billy to say just that. I can imagine giving these examples to someone who liked the film and their saying, ‘Well, it made me laugh anyway’. But it’s bad comic writing from a man with a very lofty reputation in the field (and/or careless direction – Love Actually was the first feature Curtis directed after his producing credits on Four Weddings and Notting Hill).
Richard Curtis is rightly admired both as the author of some of the best television sitcoms of the last 30 years and as the founder of Comic Relief (and a prime mover behind the ‘Make Poverty History’ project in 2005). As a result of his tremendous fund-raising campaigns, he seems to be widely regarded within the industry – and by audiences – as irreproachable. Many of his admirers seem to assume (and, on the evidence of Love Actually, so does Curtis) that having a strong moral sense necessarily makes him a much more substantial comedy writer than he would otherwise be. Even if that were true, it’s obviously not the case that comic writing is enhanced by dropping a lead weight of moral earnestness into the script. You hear people say how moved they were by the closing moments of Blackadder Goes Forth, when the trio go over the top to their deaths, and by the bit at the end of an episode of The Vicar of Dibley when the Dawn French character gets serious about the scenes of famine in Africa on her television screen (this was explicitly designed to promote ‘Make Poverty History’). I loathed these really-make-you-think moments because they were so alien to the spirit of the material; and they don’t make you think – they simply bring the jokes to a sudden halt – in order to remind us that Richard Curtis is humanitarian and make viewers feel that they must be too if they’ve been moved by these disruptions of the comic flow.
In sitcom, characters often become funny through familiarity – repeatedly presenting their essential features and turns of phrase regardless of how much the storyline of an individual episode might seem to dictate changes in behaviour. (In a really successful sitcom, the situation becomes subsidiary to the characters: Blackadder is obviously an outstanding example.) But a full-length picture, peopled by ‘original’ characters, demands different talents and there’s nothing in Love Actually to suggest that Curtis can develop character – show us different sides to people or even have them evolve – through a series of events. Most of the cast in the film are given their little set of mannerisms and idiosyncrasies at the start and the actors just keep working within this piddling range: it set my teeth on edge for a good while but the effect is eventually numbing. The verbal style of several of the main characters tends to the self-consciously self-critical: it’s the kind of writing which might just get by if the lines were delivered in an Annie Hall-ish neurotic dither – the perky elocution of the British voices makes it deadly. A fair amount of the twists and turns of the plot is 30-minute-sitcom-level too and very wearisome over 135 minutes. (For what it is, Love Actually is unbelievably protracted.)
The large cast includes a few established film actors, various familiar faces from television comedy, and some others unknown to me (several of whom deserve to stay that way). Then there’s a fourth group of performers who’ve undoubtedly made their mark on the big screen without ever suggesting they can create individuals rather than do basically typecast turns: Rowan Atkinson, Hugh Grant, Bill Nighy (who shows flair as Billy Mack, even if there’s little surprising in what he does). I don’t really know where Colin Firth belongs in this scheme of things. There was a brief moment at the start – at the point where I couldn’t believe that what Hugh Grant was saying was supposed to be taken straight and Firth’s name appeared on the opening credits – when I thought I’d got confused and that it was Firth, not Grant, in the film. Then Grant’s name appeared too. As in Bridget Jones’s Diary, sharing the screen with Grant gives Firth the opportunity to prove that, in comparison, he’s tolerable.
Among the big names, it was bad timing and upsetting to see Liam Neeson playing a recently widowed husband. At first, Neeson seems to be labouring under the misapprehension that he’s in a proper human drama; eventually he seems to get the hang of the archly heartwarming style required. Emma Thompson, as Karen (the PM’s sister and a deceived wife), tunes in more quickly and has the advantage that things get more serious for Karen as the story progresses. When she opens a Christmas present – expecting to receive the necklace she’d earlier found in her husband’s coat pocket and discovering that the jewellery was for someone else (her gift is a Joni Mitchell CD) – Karen falls to pieces then forces herself to get a grip, subduing her tears through the vigour of her forced jollity. It’s a strong moment – the epitome of the Real Human Pain that fans of Love Actually seem to find so impressive – but it’s not much of an accomplishment for a decent actress to provide ‘depth’ like this when the film is firmly positioned at the shallow end (and when some of the other performers, when they try for more, are out of their depth). The impact of what Thompson does is limited too by the miscasting of Alan Rickman as the errant husband (who, as far as we can tell, doesn’t get beyond thinking about infidelity). Rickman doesn’t find it easy to slough off his reptilian gaze and languidly scathing condescension: he’s believable as a design agency boss whose secretary wants to seduce him; at home he radiates malign boredom in a way that would have made Thompson’s fretting wife despair of their marriage long before the crisis in it that the film describes.
Laura Linney, although she’d had her first cinema success in You Can Count On Me, wasn’t that big a name when she was cast in Love Actually but she is now. In retrospect, it’s plain to see how that’s happened (and good to see that it has). As Sarah, who also works in Rickman’s design agency and has been harbouring an unspoken passion for a dreamboat colleague all the time she’s been there, Linney is resourceful and very likeable. At the office Christmas party, her dreams come true: Karl asks her to dance, then they go back to her flat and her bed and it’s a good moment because Linney has convinced you how much it means to her. Then the lovemaking is interrupted, not once but twice, by calls on her mobile from her brother. Sarah gets dressed and leaves Karl to go and visit the brother, who’s an in-patient at a mental institution. This is a clunking lurch from light to heavy and Linney does extraordinarily well to cope with the transition. Keira Knightley is also some way down the list of credits in a way that dates the film: her part as a newlywed – empty-headed until she realises that her husband (Chiwetel Ejiofor)’s best friend is secretly crazy about her – isn’t up to much but she’s so lovely to look at that she does, in that sense, transcend it.
The TV brigade includes (as well as Gregor Fisher) Martine McCutcheon, Kris Marshall and Martin Freeman, among others, with as-themselves cameos from Ant and Dec and Michael Parkinson. When the Prime Minister asks McCutcheon, as Natalie – the girl who brings his tea and biscuits at Downing Street and with whom the PM falls in love – where she’s from, I really did think at first hearing that she’d said Walford before I realised it was Wandsworth. The part is condescendingly written but McCutcheon has a sparky naturalness which is very appealing. Kris Marshall is hyperactive and unfunny as a young man with transatlantic wanderlust. Martin Freeman appears to be playing a stand-in porn film actor – but comes across as still playing Tim in The Office (down to the romantic tentativeness), except without clothes. This strand in the story is a good example of how Love Actually operates. Freeman’s character and the female body double (Joanna Page) talk naturally and easily to each other about the weather, traffic jams etc while having to perform sex acts for the camera. It’s a good idea for a sketch but that’s all there is to it – and this applies to the other stories too, except for the ones that have dollops of seriousness on top. Running sketches in parallel that don’t add to each other – the overlapping between the stories doesn’t extend beyond the characters’ work and/or family connections – doesn’t result in a multi-layered romantic comedy: it leaves you with multiple sketches.
Rodrigo Santoro, who gives a tactful, sensitive performance as Karl, is the best among the lesser-known players. His polar opposite is Andrew Lincoln, as the man who holds a torch for Knightley. Everything Lincoln does is unfelt; the only thing that’s expressive is that you can almost see his brain working to produce the next hollow, gestural detail. Thomas Sangster, as Neeson’s stepson Sam, is a different kind of problem. The 11-year old Sam’s crush on a vacuously glamorous American girl at his school is really creepy in the verbally precocious but sexless way in which the boy articulates his feelings; Sangster’s presence suggests a late adolescent girl giving an unpleasantly competent impersonation of a pre-pubescent boy. (Perhaps the worst thing about this junior romance is its implication that the spirit of Love Actually may proceed from generation unto generation.) What’s most enjoyable in the bit parts is the surprise of seeing January Jones from Mad Men as one of the three beauties that the Kris Marshall character meets on his arrival in America – she’s amusing and really vivid in her few minutes on screen.
Love Actually was released in time for Christmas 2003, about eight months after the invasion of Iraq, and the anti-American sentiment is evident. The US President played by Billy Bob Thornton doesn’t suggest Bush personally – the fact that he’s a lech seems more of a nod to Clinton and Thornton’s sinister suavity makes the character individual anyway – but the President’s bullying arrogance in matters of foreign policy is clearly supposed to be enough to make the connection with events of the time. I think the scene in which the Prime Minister speaks his mind at a press conference epitomises what many people like about Love Actually and what I find embarrassing as well as annoying about the film. The PM’s harsh words are motivated not by political principle but by the fact that’s he seen the President kissing Natalie and he’s angry. As his diatribe gathers momentum, the Prime Minister reels off the things that are great about Britain and quickly moves from sceptered isle to Harry Potter and David Beckham; ironic triumphal music plays on the soundtrack. Curtis appears to want us to laugh at the lightweight examples of national greatness – we’re British after all and we don’t take ourselves too seriously – but this moment also seems to express a fantasy of what many people longed Blair to do to Bush in 2003: so the audience not only gets an easy laugh but is encouraged to feel pleased with itself. There’s no political fallout to the Prime Minister’s plain speaking: the fact that Curtis’s script doesn’t imagine what might happen as a result of it gets across the point, perhaps unintentionally, that rupturing the special relationship is easier wished for than done. (The idea of an unpopular prime minister discovering that his poll ratings have risen by an outburst triggered by sexual jealousy is a rich comic idea but there’s too much potential friction in it to suit Curtis’s purposes.)
Is it a coincidence that, when the cast come together for their curtain call in the airport arrivals area, as ‘God Only Knows’ plays, the principal American character in the story is the only one absent? There’s no sign of Laura Linney, let alone her mentally ill brother, in the closing assembly: their feelings for each other evidently don’t count as proper love, as they’re not susceptible to a happy ending. The range of types of love celebrated by Curtis is pretty limited: perish the thought that, for example, one of the couples might be gay. (The relationship ended by the one funeral in Four Weddings is evidently sufficient coverage of that side of love.) The picture is itself an example of the terrible things that are done in the name of festive entertainment but it’s the pretensions to seriousness that make it a true abomination. I’d much prefer an honestly crude, silly comedy: a feelgood picture is one thing, a feelsmug one is unforgiveable. Love Actually is gift-wrapped solid gold shite.
9 April 2009