uneven

Rating: Null/10 (21 November 2004)

Incredibly uneven movie! I really like good romantic comedies. Four Weddings was brilliant, but Curtis seems to need a kill -your-darlings assistant badly these days. About the characters and the stories, I have these comments: It's nice that there is love between races, social classes and nationalities in this film but why 1. are almost all the women servants or assistants and almost all of the men more powerful (bosses, prime ministers, authors etc)? Women serve lots of coffee in this film! And the more ambition they tend to show (sexual or work-wise), the more villainous they seem. Rickman's secretary is the obvious case. Very old-fashioned view of the sexes. 2. Why are there no gay couples? Curtis has used minority groups (also disabled people) in romantic situations before in his films, and to their advantage, so it's a pity he didn't this time when there are so many couples present. 3. Speaking of that, why so many couples? Four would have been sufficient. We don't get to know any of them well enough as it is. About the principal roles: Billy Mack - fun character who interpunctuates the film, and it's nice that Curtis dares satirize himself with the song chosen. Sarah - Laura Linney is a great actress and very touching, but this is a situation that obviously needed more screen time. Harry and Karen - Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson are great actors, but Thompson is so good she belongs in another film. Her outburst "you have made my life ridiculous" rings so true and is so painful it's weird to see it followed by a lot of haphazard happy conclusions. I want another movie, just about Karen and her world. Hugh Grant's part is fun as usual, he is turning into a modern Cary Grant in the sense that he does one thing to perfection and if you like that he will always deliver. If you don't, it's best to stay away. His love story is sweet, not very credible at all but OK in a romantic comedy sort of way.
Liam Neeson is good as always as the widower but the boy who plays his son has stuffy lines and delivers them like an American TV sitcom kid - you know, robot actor kid style with "timing". The situation about him learning to play the drums to impress a girl is credible but he is not. Colin Firth's writer falling in love with the Portugese cleaning girl is not a very developed character, so Curtis depends entirely on the fact that Firth, like Grant, works so well in romantic scenes. The scene where he meets her family and is offered the supposedly fat and homely daughter is insulting to her and to the Portugese. "The rest of Europe" is here seen as "charmingly" old-fashioned (which oddly enough the film itself is, most irritably). Keira Knightley's character has never realized that her husband's best friend (Andrew Lincoln) is in love with her. I can believe that as she is not perceptive at all about other people in the film, just full of herself, what she wants and how she looks. That story goes to prove that displeasant people can also make others fall madly in love, depressing but at least credible. Lincoln is sweet in the part, he makes the segment work although you root for him to quickly find a worthier object of his affections. Rowan Atkinson and Billy Bob Thornton are good but a bit under-used, but in this film, who isn't. The story about the British guy getting hot US girls is below anyone's dignity. What the ??? was that all about? The story of the porn actors behaving like blushing teenagers even during faked sex is totally strange and forced. Why wold these obviously painfully shy and easily embarrassed people have picked that sort of job at all?