Multi-faceted, but not many splendoured

Rating: Null/10 (3 April 2004)

The worst thing that can happen is when a talent, whether musical, political or literal starts to believe their own hype. Just such a thing appears to have happened to Richard Curtis, writer of Love Actually and lauded genius of cast-iron bankable brit comedy hits.
Whilst most of the lottery cash and hopes for a resurgent British film industry have gone round the u-bend with turds like 'Sex Lives of the potato men', and a rash of bad, cheap horror movies, Curtis stands in a different league, able to command huge budgets, bona fide movie stars and his own skill in writing sharp dialogue and memorable characters. In the past his films have also relied on the picturesque, and free, sound stage of London and the English countryside.
The main flaw with Love Actually is that it's overkill in all of these elements. Crammed with name actors, from Niam Leeson to Emma Thompson (an act of Parliament should also be passed to ban Hugh Grant from at least one of his moves, for all our sanity), charming, but slightly jaded London - the way Americans like to consume it - 8 different story strands of characters and continuous contrived situations allowing Curtis to indulge in his slapstick-cum-'Kids say the funniest things' type screenwriting.
To digress, one of the most tedious 'jokes' in British comedy screenwriting is the one where a middle class, RP-accented kid makes a reference to drugs, yardies or gansta rap as these were two unimaginably seperated words. Well, they're not.
By cramming all this in, the film does not feel like the light-calorie comic smorgasbord of 'Four Weddings' (The original - and still the best 'brit flick'), but one of those 'all you can eat' Scandinavian cruise liner buffets.
Two hours of being fed whimsy, coincidence, posh kids and Curtis' trademark pantomime style endings. In search of the whimsy Curtis has set absolutely no boundaries in letting the Prime Minister fall in love with his tea lady: while the President of the United States is also keen on getting into her pants.
The outcome of this - Britain decides to change its entire foreign policy position towards the US doesn't feel charming or amusing, just stupid and unbelievable.
But Love Actually not so much leans on the principle of suspension of belief but is propped up on it like crutches to allow it to get away with various outrages, including the fact the tea lady's working class nephew and the Prime Minister's sister's upper middle class kids all go to the same comprehensive in South London.
Curtis is bound at that point of bringing his disparate stories together at that point for that coherent sense of a unified end to the movie, but in reality there is no real connection between his tales of unrequited love, secret love, unexpected love, filial love, love across the social divide and the dying love of a middle aged sexless marriage.
This last one is probably the most infuriating, as Emma Thompson is a great actress and the film's one moment of genuinely acted (rather than cue-carded) emotion is when the reality of her husband's disinterest in her is unavoidably presented in the form of a Christmas present.
I'd like to have seen more of her, of this, of Rickman, especially as the first part of the story - the mechanics of his infidelity is treated entirely as a joke.
But the film is like a Ghost Train, it's whisking you off to the next silly situation before you have time to pause breath.
In a supreme effort not to be cynical I believe there is a point to what Curtis is trying to say, rather than divest us each of a fiver at our most emotionally penetrable point of the year. Love is a protean, healing, binding force that perhaps gives our daily activities some sort of meaning, or at least makes them bearable, and in the final analysis it is the human connections we have we will turn to in our darkest and lightest moments.
But the examination of it is impatient, badly-structuted, often trite and ultimately, despite its high-calorific content, unsatisfying.