If you want to turn off your sense of reality, then lights off and hit play

Rating: 5/10 (27 July 2014)

"Love Actually" was recommended to me by many friends as a singular example that there are still good romantic movies out there: Movies that do not seem to repeat the usual Hollywood pattern to this type of genre but provide a new way of telling a sweet story that will make you feel good in the end. To come straight to the point, Love Actually tries his hardest to do so and succeeds some of the time while at other times it continues to stumble into the deepest pitfalls of kitsch and cliché that you have seen since Titanic.
The first surprising thing about this movie is the sheer number of well- known actors that star in it: Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, Martin Freeman and Keira Knightley, to name only a few. There are in total ten different story lines, all of which circle around the topic of love. These lines, while overlapping at several times, are still kept rather separate from each other, meaning that there isn't much interaction between the actors. The prime minister and his employee, the writer and his maid, the step-dad and his son, the married couple and the best man, they are all connected somehow but basically never cross paths, instead telling their own separate stories.
This of course means that the movie's 135 minutes have to be split up into ten parts, leaving on average only about twelve minutes for each story line. Furthermore, Director Richard Curtis insists on squeezing as many sweet, heart-warming moments into these twelve minutes as possible while serving virtually every romantic-comedy cliché you have ever seen: He chasing her across the airport to proclaim his love, the dramatic proposal in front of a crowd of people, the sweet kid who falls in love way too soon and basically a lot of him-finally-telling-her-how-he- really-feels-in-a-dramatic-gesture.
This along with the above mentioned lack of intersection leads to the fact that the plot of each story line could be summarized in only one or two sentences. What remains is a strong effort to make you love or cry, mostly achieved by turning up the music volume to a maximum. And while Craig Armstrong has created a great soundtrack for this purpose with a lot of piano-and-violin pieces, the conveyed emotion remains mostly artificial: The characters and therefore the scenes simply lack depth because of their little on-screen time. This is above all disappointing since the cast contains so many actors who we know to be capable of amazing performances.
The general feeling of artificiality in these scenes is further enhanced by the fact that most of them are done without any trace of realism: A prime minister like this would never exist in real life, a marriage proposal should be neither made nor accepted if you have never had a conversation in a common language before and no kid can learn to play the drums that good in a couple of weeks. Things just aren't that simple in real life.
Another disappointing aspect is the movie's lack of diversity: In ten different couples whose love story is told, the script apparently did not have room for one homosexual or even a bad-looking couple. What's most aggravating about this is the fact that the movie approaches the topic here and there, but immediately dismisses it later on, for example:

After being told that his stepson is in love, he asks him what her or his name is, whereupon the kid instantly replies that HER name is Joana.

The singer leaves an award party after realizing that the love of his life is his "fat old manager" yet their love is only depicted as a strong male friendship without physical contact.

When the writer flies to Portugal to propose to his former maid, he arrives at her parents' house and asks to see the daughter. The father then calls upon his other, obese daughter and the writer tells him that he is there to see his other daughter who of course looks "normal".

To be fair, there is also an interracial marriage and the portrayal of a love between siblings, one of whom is mentally handicapped, yet all in all the relationships are mostly between attractive, heterosexual white people.
To summarize, "Love Actually" does not tell a typical movie love story – it tells ten of them. While this is somewhat unprecedented, it does not immediately validate the movie. The actors are not given enough possibility to show their abilities and the script lacks ingenuity. If you want to be swept off your feet and drowned in emotion, this is the wrong movie. If you want to just turn off your sense of reality and be served a large number of clichés, however, then lights off and hit play.