Too Much Plot by Half

Rating: 6/10 (23 January 2015)

Sentimental Christmas-themed movies are something we normally associate with America, but in 2003 the British cinema decided to have a go at producing one of its own. "Love Actually" was written and directed by Richard Curtis, the great doyen of the British romantic comedy, who had earlier been responsible for "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Notting Hill". Unlike those two films which only dealt with a single love story, this one is an example of "hyperlink cinema", with numerous interlinked plot lines involving a wide variety of individuals.
Almost all of the story lines, which take place in the weeks before and after one Christmas, mostly in London, involve different aspects of love. That does not mean that they are all "boy-meets-girl" love stories, although there are indeed several of those. David, the newly elected bachelor Prime Minister, finds true love with his pretty young tea lady Natalie. Jamie, a novelist, breaks up with his girlfriend after discovering she has been cheating on him with his brother and retreats to his holiday home in Provence, where he begins a romance with his Portuguese housekeeper Aurelia, despite the fact that neither can speak a word of the other's language. Some of the stories, however, look at the idea of "love" from a different angle. A recurring storyline involves Billy, an ageing rock star hoping for a comeback with a cover version of "Love Is All Around". There is no romantic interest in Billy's life; he claims that his great "love" is his manager Joe, but as both men are firmly heterosexual he is using "love" in the sense of platonic friendship. (There are, in fact, no gay or lesbian love stories featured).
Daniel, a widower, helps his young stepson Sam who has a crush on a girl in his class. This story is really more about father-son relationships than about romantic love, although it never really rang true. I felt that in reality Sam would have been too distraught over the death of his mother to worry that one of his classmates was moving back to America and that Daniel too distraught over the death of his wife to be thinking about starting a new romance so soon.
I described the film as "hyperlink cinema", but in fact it differs from most hyperlink films in two ways. It is a light comedy, unlike the likes of "Syriana", "Babel", "Crash" and "The Hours", all of which deal with serious themes. And secondly, with nine separate stories it has more plot lines than most of them. ("Babel" and "The Hours" only had three). It is, in fact, this multiplicity of plot lines which is the film's main weakness, as there is insufficient space to deal with them all satisfactorily. The four mentioned above are all dealt with fairly fully, but others are very perfunctory and leave the viewer guessing. Is, for example Harry (the husband of David's sister Karen) actually having an affair with his secretary, or does he merely fancy her? What eventually happens to John and Judy, those politely diffident middle- class porn stars? The two most potentially serious stories, that of Mark and his unrequited love for his best friend's wife and that of Sarah and Karl, whose romance is blighted by her need to care for a mentally disturbed brother, are both told very sketchily, as though Curtis were shying away from their implications.
In "Four Weddings" and "Notting Hill" Curtis seemed to be courting the American market; in both films the heroine is an American and played by a big-name Hollywood star. (Andie McDowell and Julia Roberts). Here he seems to be trying to alienate that market. The American President, a bully in his foreign policy and a seedy predator in his relationships with women, combines the most unattractive qualities of George Bush with those of Bill Clinton. When David, infuriated by the President's unwanted advances towards Natalie, makes a tactlessly undiplomatic anti- American speech he becomes a national hero; Curtis obviously wanted to align himself with those in Britain who resented Tony Blair's support for Bush's Iraq policy. The only American involved in the main stories is the hapless Sarah, the sort of woman who infuriates her boyfriend by insisting on answering the telephone while they are making love. One character, Colin, visits Milwaukee to test his theory that all American girls are nymphomaniacs who are driven wild by a British accent- and finds it is perfectly true!
The film stars some of the biggest names of the British cinema, but because of the many separate strands to the plot some of them have surprisingly little to do. I doubt, for example, if even the Keira Knightley Fan Club will ever rank "Love Actually" among their heroine's greatest films, and the same could be said for Liam Neeson and Alan Rickman. There are, however, some decent performances from the likes of Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson and Colin Firth, all practised hands at romantic comedy, and a particularly good one from Bill Nighy as Billy, whose refreshingly honest cynicism about the pop business and his part in it makes the long-suffering Joe despair. Nighy displays great comic timing in delivering Billy's one-liners; I particularly liked his crack about Britney Spears, unfortunately too bawdy (and libellous) to repeat here. There is also a nice cameo from Rowan Atkinson as that smarmily obsequious shop assistant. These are enough to save the film from a lower mark, but I felt that it would have been better if Curtis had reduced the number of plot lines to, say, four or five. Too much plot by half. 6/10