Creating the Green World

Rating: 10/10 (15 June 2018)

Romantic comedy is, at its essence, the creation of a new couple, and literally, a new community a new society, out of refugees from dysfunctional social orders. Very commonly, it is a narrative of different social orders, of high culture and low culture, rich and poor, this culture and that culture. It is the creation of a dream world of possiblilities created in opposition to a real world of limitations and cruel, casual savagery. To make a good romantic comedy, you need to show realistic worlds of experience. You need to treat them realistically, with all of their depth and pain and logic. And you need your actors and authoring principals to commit to the Green World of possibility with all of their sincere hopes and dreams, and personal experience, coupled with their professional abilities
If you can obtain all of that-which is a rare attainment in an era of irony and unearned cynicism-then a film such as this may result. The screenwriter, Richard Curtis is a little dismissive of his own efforts, and commonly people who like Curtis's films like Four WedDings and a Funeral, and dismiss Notting Hill as a simpler, more derivative film. But the focus on the romantic leads is fuller in Notting Hill, and in a comedy in which the hidden world of interior journeys is essential, I think this helps. The film is easily Julia Roberts' best. The range of vulnerability and longing her Anna Scott projects, followed by cynicism and brittleness in the next moment, amusement, pain, callousness, fear, a range of complexity from moment to moment as her character progresses through the narrative, is as fine a work as any actress in comedy ever has achieved, in my opinion. Why she did not receive more professional acclaim for this role is a mystery to me, unless it were that she seemed to be playing herself. Hugh Grant's William Thacker is more the sounding board for Roberts' Anna, though his wistful, neurotic passiveness, mixed with a depth of reticent knowledge and unexpressed feeling is precisely the alternative to the narcissistic aggressiveness and expressiveness of Anna Scott's peers. Together, they balance in a centered life is shared experience that, in the film's world, neither can find separately in their own social world.
There are other great romantic comedies. There are other touching dramas, and films and television worth watching. But there are few great romantic comedies that sincerely present feelings, and that suggest that love means sharing the self one can never become without a partner. This is one of those few.