Hugh Grant in Christmas classic Love Actually. Photo / Supplied
OPINION:
In 2003, Love Actually was Richard Curtis’s Christmas present to the nation – an enormous, gift-wrapped confection bejewelled with all his favourite stars. The marketing machine went into overdrive, and the box office, spanning the entire period from November through February, was a crackerjack £36.4 million (NZ$60.6m) in the UK alone.
To the sound of champagne corks popping in Working Title’s offices, it succeeded in beating the opening weekends of Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary (though falling some way shy of the latter’s £42 million ($69.9m) overall take).
There was only one problem: the reviews. Most of the UK broadsheet press, after collaborating heartily in the feel-good promotional process, handed the reviewing task over to feel-bad critics who didn’t like it at all. They – I would say we, but I personally dodged this assignment – responded a little like Emma Thompson’s character, opening what she dearly hoped was a gold-plated heart necklace, only to discover a Joni Mitchell box set inside instead.
In real life, no one with taste would actually prefer that hideous pendant thing Alan Rickman buys for his conniving temptress of a secretary, but the idea of responding to the Mitchell bait-and-switch with active relief – now there’s a punchline Thompson could have worked with – is not Curtis’s style at all.
The critics had no choice but to cast themselves as a fulmination of Scrooges – openly so, in the case of the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “Leaving the cinema,” he wrote, “the question that occurred to me – along with ‘Are there no workhouses?’ and ‘You’ll want the whole day tomorrow, I suppose, Cratchit?’ was this. ‘Does Mr Curtis have special screenwriting software to produce this sort of thing?’”.
Our own Sukhdev Sandhu was hardly kinder. “A stale and contrived let-down,” he concluded, “[...] as full of genuine Christmas joy as a high-street window-shop display.”
Whatever their complaints, Love Actually has enjoyed a dogged afterlife in its claim on the cultural imagination. It has remained highly visible and hard to get rid of, like an embarrassing uncle who keeps turning up every Christmas and expecting egg nog. Why else would ABC be airing an hour-long TV reunion special this season, entitled The Laughter & Secrets of Love Actually: 20 Years Later, which will have Diane Sawyer interviewing several of the biggest names in the cast?
In 2017, lest we forget, Curtis already offered up a sequel to Love Actually, in which we discovered what was meant to have happened to all these couples in the intervening 14 years. There were two, if only two, pluses to this follow-up: it was a mere 12 minutes long, and succeeded in raising money for Red Nose Day.
One thing we never did find out, because of Rickman’s death and Thompson’s demurral about reprising her role, was whether their characters stayed together. Even the film’s sternest critics tend to have nice words for her teary bedroom scene, piecing herself back together before braving Christmas Eve with the kids. It’s hardly a flag-flying moment for feminist self-respect, but it remains one of the film’s more humanly understandable moments.
The real problem is the lack of these. Love Actually can’t decide if it’s set in a world that exists – when 9/11 happened, and loved ones put in phone calls just before their deaths – or one that doesn’t, in which Hugh Grant is a bachelor PM, Martin Freeman is a body double, and Martine McCutcheon is unironically referred to as “the chubby girl”.
Curtis’s single worst move – yes, even worse than the whole subplot with Kris Marshall as a chirpy sex predator on holiday in Milwaukee – is the opening narration he gives Grant, about what love means in a post-9/11 world. Co-opting the tragedy of the century as a thematic backdrop to all these completely fantasised, greetings-cards sentiments is an insane faux pas, as every major critic agreed. Sandhu called it “a grotesque piece of emotional blackmail”; Bradshaw “icky and disingenuous”.
It sets up the worst scenes at the Heathrow arrival gate ever conceived. Not only is Thomas Sangster’s lovelorn 12-year-old profoundly grieving for his dead mum, but his dad (Liam Neeson) encourages him to race up to the coolest girl in school and declare his feelings? Potentially life-scarring advice right there. It makes you wonder if Curtis made a habit of this at school, and if all the girls really found it so adorable.
Big, embarrassing romantic gestures have always been his stock-in-trade, but forcing one on a strange-looking tween feels ruinously premature. Meanwhile, opinion has always been divided on the Andrew Lincoln/Keira Knightley/Chiwetel Ejiofor love triangle with the placard-toting, but not, surely, on two particular aspects of it. Ejiofor is given no character whatsoever, and the fuschia shirt he wears on his wedding day is, categorically, the worst thing in all cinema.
If Lincoln didn’t give such a cringe-inducingly self-conscious performance, the scene where he shows up on Knightley’s doorstep, pouring his heart out on a series of placards, might feasibly invite more empathy than it tends to get. He’s often called a creep and a stalker, going behind his best friend’s back with a needless outpouring that can only make things awkward. But “without hope or agenda” are good words to stick up there. Let’s just hope he meant them, and hasn’t made a habit of it every Christmas since.
What else? Freeman and Joanna Page have that cute, silly skit as vanilla sex scene stand-ins in a Curtisverse no one could ever recognise as our own. No one non-white or non-heterosexual gets much to do except tote clipboards, stand attentively in the background, and occasionally applaud.
A lesbian subplot was written and even shot – it’s a deleted scene – with Anne Reid as Sangster’s headmistress and Frances de la Tour as her dying partner. It isn’t much, but the gesture would have been appreciated. After catching his girlfriend in bed with his brother, Colin Firth’s rebound dalliance in Portugal (with forgotten singer Lúcia Moniz) is standard Year-in-Provence-style pablum, at least until an offensive bit of mistaken identity with a “hilariously” unattractive local. Firth also says “spaz”. This was 2003, not 1978.
Bill Nighy gets all the best lines, of course, in a showboating performance that put him on the international map. As the film’s sole instance of Platonic love mattering, his relationship with Gregor Fisher’s downtrodden manager is touching enough. The Grant-McCutcheon story is ridiculous, even by Curtis’s high standards of ridiculousness, but at least genially played; the Laura Linney-Rodrigo Santoro one is performed with far more sincerity (by Linney only) than it ultimately deserves.
She gets that spontaneous bit jumping for joy behind the door of her house, when she’s finally brought Santoro back. But it’s downhill as soon as her mentally ill brother gets her on the phone. Damn those with pesky impediments, permanently obstructing everyone else’s chances for happiness, and making entire audiences scream with frustration at Linney’s behaviour. Can she really never commit to another date again?
Love Actually perpetrates so much fraud in the name of entertainment that it’s amazing it wasn’t openly laughed out of town. The tone of the reviews was more sheepish than wholly damning, except Chris Tookey’s 5-star rave in the Daily Mail (“the technique and self-discipline are staggering”).
Self-discipline? The “dodgy” part of Wandsworth where Grant chases McCutcheon down is not Wandsworth. Presumably the whole of Wandsworth erred just a little too far on the dodgy side, so the production chose a terrace in Herne Hill, now worth something in the region of £1 million ($1.67m).
What a lovely gesture of Curtis’s, to collapse class divides by matchmaking the posh premier with a sweary lass from the totally gentrified wrong side of the tracks. And let’s not forget “chubby”. Alas, the sequel didn’t climax with McCutcheon hauling Curtis on screen and giving him a clip around the ear. Rather, her character married Grant’s, although he maintained that he “liked it best when you worked for me.” It’s still embarrassing, and only gets worse with age.
The film explores themes of survival and humanity during societal collapse.