Disappointing but occasionally entertaining

Rating: 5/10 (25 September 2005)

Well I felt moved to post a comment on LA after just seeing it on DVD. I had heard so many good things that I actually went & bought the DVD and was really looking forward to it but I was very disappointed...actually. After watching I looked it up on IMDb & checked out a sample of other viewers' comments...and was hugely surprised by the fact that the majority were very positive ones with a high score! I would have expected an absolute slating on a discerning movie site like this to be honest...
OK so for the positive - the film was entertaining in places, had great production values (the London scenery shots were very attractive). Most of the large (and well-known) ensemble cast were good actors and did their best with the material. I laughed (very) occasionally.
But overall the negative prevailed and I came away feeling like I had wasted my time on a film that hadn't "added" anything to my cinematic experiences. The main negative IMO was that there were far too many stories, all of which were given too little airtime to make any of the them involving or interesting. I presume it was the director's deliberate intention to give us snippets of many "love" stories to expound on the theme that "love is all around"! This can sometimes work but here it really didn't...the bad stories should have been dropped and the good ones should have been expanded so that we come away feeling some kind of affiliation with at least a few characters.
So IMO the best stories were:- Laura Linney's 2 year unrequited love - finally reciprocated but unconsummated due to her personal responsibilities for her brother, Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman and the near-derailing of their marriage by a potential affair, Colin Firth and his cleaner gradually getting attracted in France However these were not developed properly - we saw fragments and then abrupt/uncertain or melodramatic (see Colin) conclusions, which was a shame as I had (eventually) actually started to care about these characters.
Some of the rest were clearly rubbish - English guy in US gets 4 girls, Andrew Lincoln loves best friend's wife despite never having spoken to her (OK I know she's Keira Knightley but still!), little boy fancies American girl. Surely nobody could have found these stories involving! Even the supposedly headline story of PM and his assistant was so underwritten as to be inconsequential. I like Hugh Grant and Martine McCutcheon and they did their best...but we'd only seen a couple of scenes between their characters where they had barely exchanged 2 words. So when Hugh read Martine's Xmas card the viewer could scarcely be expected to believe in their sudden mutual love!! Again if this fledging relationship had previously been explored a bit more I too would have been rooting for Hugh to find her in Wandsworth!
And there was no credible or consequential tie-in between characters (unlike say Crash or Magnolia) which I think is a must if you are going to have this type of multi-layered story-telling Some of them happened to attend the same school play?! And then some of them happened to be at Heathrow arrivals on the same day?! These were for the most part unrelated characters.
Apart from this mishmash of quantity not quality and unrelated stories, the whole film just felt too slick. It felt like Richard Curtis was following a checklist of ingredients for "Successful English Comedy" and though I know he probably did the same for 4W&AF and NH for some reason both of those felt more substantial and I enjoyed them. This one really really felt like we were all (director, actors and viewers) going through the motions one more time. In a similar vein unlike the previous romcoms when I had got caught up in the mush, I really noticed here when the director was giving us "reaction signposts" and it irked me enough I stubbornly refused to follow his directions! Ie this bit's silly (English guy meets 4 hot American chicks), this bit's funny (PM dances around No 10), this bit's moving (Liam Neeson bonds with stepson) etc etc
So overall then not terrible but a bit of a wasted opportunity for an interesting idea and some top-drawer talent.