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| Love Actually |
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  (8/10)
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Runtime: 128 |
| Public Rating: 7.87 (309 votes) |
Director: Richard Curtis |
MPAA Rating:  |
| Genre: Romantic comedy |
Year: 2003 |
| Writer(s): Richard Curtis |
| Distributor: Universal Pictures |
| Reviewed by: Avril Carruthers |
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Produced by Duncan Kenworthy, Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner.
Starring Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Laura Linney, Liam Neeson, Martine McCutcheon, Keira Knightley, Rowan Atkinson, Andrew Lincoln, Billy Bob Thornton, Kris Marshall, Lucia Moniz, Martin Freeman, Thomas Sangster.
Europe’s leading film production company Working Title Films, co-helmed by producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, is responsible for a new wave of highly successful romantic comedies. Teamed with producer Duncan Kenworthy and screenwriter Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’ Diary), Love Actually is Curtis’ directorial debut. It combines all the best elements of his comic style with enough emotional depth in his characters and situations to avoid sentimentality. The result, especially in Love Actually, is the most direct expression yet of Curtis’ up-beat, optimistic view of the world.
That view is put in the voice-over in the opening moments of the film: ‘General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed – but I don’t see that – seems to me that love is everywhere.’ The last messages and phone calls on 9/11, he says in Hugh Grant’s voice, were not about hatred but full of love. Curtis does this frequently: it’s a technique of following what might be a bland or general comment with something true, touching or intimate, that both creates the humour and makes it influential in opening us up to share his view. Starting in an airport arrivals gate, with all sorts of ordinary people hugging and delighted to see each other, the movie proceeds to show us that love actually is all around us.
The film has 22 leading actors and nine concurrent story lines which cycle rapidly and converge at the end, on Christmas Eve. Each story is about the thrills and agonies of love in its many manifestations: love at first sight, infatuation, first love, unrequited love, bereaved love, love over time, tentative love growing through friendship, familial love, loyal and betrayed love. Each relationship has risk, embarrassment and moments of truth that are intrinsically funny and that are Curtis’ trademark. The effect is exactly as Curtis intended – like seeing a mass of strangers at an airport terminal and seeing into their lives and relationships, reading their faces to know their stories. It makes the world a much warmer, smaller place.
It’s an extraordinary cast line-up, with each character needing to be drawn as economically and presented as truthfully as possible without explication. So, as the stories continue, more is discovered about each one and their interconnections. With the focus on their love-lives, much is simplified and as each character is brought to their edge, much is revealed about their values and priorities.
As the character of David, Britain’s newest Prime Minister, Hugh Grant’s comic timing and unselfconscious dignity is well suited. He’s a bachelor who has the misfortune to fall for his refreshingly forthright tea lady Natalie (Martine McCutcheon) within ten minutes of arriving at No. 10 Downing St. Alan Rickman has a dry and understated touch in Harry, a boss who’s a little too impressed with the attentions of a flirtatious younger employee. Emma Thompson plays his wife Karen, whose loyalty is betrayed yet who trusts her long-time relationship enough to confront him without games. Laura Linney puts a slightly different, more self-denying, twist on the relationship with her brother than in You Can Count on Me, as Sarah, wistfully in love with Karl.
Jamey (Colin Firth) escapes broken-hearted from his unfaithful girlfriend to the south of France, where he meets Aurelia (Lucia Moniz), a Portuguese girl engaged to clean his house and cook. There’s much humour in the fact that neither speaks the other’s language, yet they converse with perfect agreement. Liam Neeson displays a deft hand at comedy too, as Daniel, recently bereaved and at first unable to reach his 10 year-old stepson, Sam, played by Thomas Sangster with luminous seriousness. Sam’s complete devotion to the coolest girl in his class and his resourceful persistence to get her to notice him is as true to type as any lover through the ages. Love smites all with utter abandon and none is immune.
A memorable performance by a truly radiant Keira Knightley as newly married Juliet includes one of the most heart-wrenching and memorable declarations of love in the film. The range of emotions swiftly gone through by Juliet and Mark, (Andrew Lincoln) her husband’s best friend and best man, whom she believes dislikes her, is affectingly funny and sweet. Another side of love is touched on in the platonic relationship between aging ex-heroin-addict rocker Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) and his long-suffering manager, Joe (Gregor Fisher). As the outrageously warts-and-all Billy is attempting a Christmas season comeback with a cynical hit in the song ‘Love is all around’, he realises with some shock that the only relationship which has outlasted everything else in his flamboyant career is with Joe.
A superb scene involves an immaculately groomed Billy Bob Thornton as the visiting US President to London. The new incumbent of No. 10 Downing St very publicly lets the arrogant political leader with the wandering hands and a shoddy sense of boundaries know that he, his female staff, and Britain, won’t be bullied. He thereby earns the undying devotion of the entire country (and his tea lady). Love makes his priorities very clear.
Undoubtedly there are worse ways to spend a couple of hours than in seeing this film and allowing its very funny dialogue, gentle, self-deprecating wit and exuberant joy to infiltrate your life. One or two of the stories are a little too sketchy or flippant and tying all the relationships together at the end of the movie is a little clumsy but forgivable as each relationship comes to some kind of crisis point and resolutions emerge. The relationships are not perfect, because the people are real, flawed. The end of the movie is back at the airport, with people whose stories we now know greeting and hugging each other. We ourselves could be among them. One of the film’s strengths is in showing how each relationship will survive – and only because of their love, actually.
Avril Carruthers, 23rd October 2003
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