Quality trowelmanship

Rating: 7/10 (23 November 2005)

I didn't want to like 'Four Weddings and a Funeral', but in the end, I just couldn't help it. Writer Richard Curtis is a master of situation comedy, and although manipulative and sentimental, the film was constructed with sufficient skill to force one to care for the characters, even when one's head might have been telling one to vomit. 'Notting Hill' is virtually a retread of the same film: there's another Curtis script, Hugh Grant plays an Englishman falling for an unavailable American, lashings of soppy music and moments of poignancy. Unfortunately, it's obviously not as fresh as its predecessor, and moreover the essence of the earlier film has been not so much replicated, as distilled into something almost unbearably trite and false. Grant's character Thacker, for example, is almost a parody of the one he played previously; he lives in a Notting Hill that can be considered (depending on your perspective) either stylised or racially cleansed; and although (unlike in 'Four Weddings') we do actually see how he earns his living (as a cute, inefficient bookseller) this in no way accounts for the quality of his life (for example, he owns a main door flat in central Notting Hill, which is not the average abode of an impecunious shop owner). Indeed, whereas in the funeral scene of the earlier movie, we at least saw that not all of the characters necessarily lived in the manner their fancy wedding attire might have suggested, in 'Notting Hill' all the heroes are sympathetically unmaterialistic and yet none seem to in any way be strapped for cash; even when one loses their job, and another's business fails, there seem to be no negative consequences, and no-one envies anybody else's success, either. It's as if each character has to be given problems to make them seem human, vulnerable and sympathetic, but these problems are not in turn allowed to puncture the essentially idyllic set-up. The scene where one of Thacker's friends, who is beautiful but paralysed, half-laughs off her disability (able to do this because of the depth of her husband's love for her), really does make one reach for the sick bucket in its mawkish conceit.
Yet Curtis is just so good as writing this rubbish that I find I can't hate this film either, even though I should. There are some very funny jokes (although some lines seem virtual copies of those in 'Four Weddings'), and the romance is played by all with infinitely more skill than in, say, 'Bridget Jones Diary' (which also had a Curtis script, but which was infinitely cruder in its execution). It may all be laid on with a trowel, but the trowelmanship is the best in its class. So I find I have to give this film seven out of ten. Oh, well. Maybe I'll manage to hate 'Love, actually'.