Parody of some good fairy tale

Rating: Null/10 (15 June 1999)

I tried very hard not to dislike this movie but found it almost impossible to do so. From the very start I couldn't believe in the story that it was trying to sell us. And by the end, when Anna Scott asked William to love her like an ordinary girl, it just became too tough a lump to swallow because the whole movie had been built around the fact that she is NOT an ordinary girl. As a fairy tale the movie doesn't click for me because there were such a lot of mismatched elements; elements that do not belong in a fairy tale. Starting from the very notion that a temperamental international movie star will find lifelong marital bliss with a rather befuddled London storekeeper.
This movie can't run away from being compared to Four Weddings and A Funeral and maybe it should be. I really liked Four Weddings and A Funeral for its comic energy and its zany but likeable characters who were all really good folks at heart. And I liked Hugh Grant there as a fumbling charmer who follows his heart in the end after a few misfires. The story of boy meets extraordinary girl but is afraid to commit reminds us of our own choices. We know what we want, sometimes we even know what is good for us but we are afraid to try and get it.
Notting Hill is the story of boy meets movie star but is afraid to commit. This time around I think he has very valid reasons not to commit but all that is lost in the frenetic and overdramatic last 15 minutes. From the very beginning, it seemed highly improbable that a worldly seen-it-all woman like Anna Scott would kiss a stranger who has just spilt juice on her. Taking that huge leap required me to hoist my disbelief up to dizzying heights for the rest of the movie. Before that, there was also the nagging thought that a movie star like Anna would actually agree to follow a strange man into his house and change her clothes there.
While the supporting cast in Four Weddings was endearingly quirky, the bunch here seemed a pale shadow of their predecessors. In Notting Hill, they are weird for the sake of being weird. The roommate Spike was all too predictable, a one dimensional comic relief who had no depth, no redeeming qualities that would help us understand why the younger sister would fall in love with him. And the pain of watching Honey make a fool of herself the first time she meets Anna only substantiated the fact that this story never intended for us to see Anna as a mere mortal.
And because of the movie star aura obstructing our vision, we never really find out whether Anna is a nice suitable match for William, assuming that all he wants is a nice suitable soulmate for himself as he did in Four Weddings. The writer tries to convince us that Anna is a nice person by throwing at us really deviant blind date types like the woman who wouldn't eat a cooked vegetable. William never gets a chance to develop a normal relationship with any of these dates before Anna started imposing herself on him again.
What do we know about Anna? She is a movie star, she is gorgeous, she doesn't have any bad habits, she can talk nicely to a bunch of people around a dinner table and she inexplicably likes William enough to sleep with him. What do we know about Anna when she tries to be an ordinary girl? She can't stand people criticizing her even though she's been in show biz for the last ten years, she is a very career minded professional who doesn't stay in one place a whole lot, she doesn't stand up for William when her boyfriend mistreats him, she throws a tantrum when her public life interferes with her romance and starts blaming everyone else, she leaves William in limbo without even calling him to try and clear things up after that episode. To cap it all off, she comes back and asks William to accept her.
The last decision was of course William's to make. And what about William? He is portrayed as being very ordinary. He is supposed to be an average man with no bad habits, a handsome face and no girlfriend although he owns a store in one of the busiest parts of London where people from all over the world traipse through daily. He is apparently no overachiever and is satisfied with his routine life, traveling no more than a few hundred yards a day from his home to his shop and back. Then he has the world's most famous movie star falling in love with him. He gets to know her personally for a total of not more than 48 hours.
Last of all, I pity Hugh Grant for getting stuck in stuttering roles for the rest of his career.