Love Actually (Christmas Edition) (DVD)

...and Mark, who knows unrequited love when he feels it. Dropped in as added extras are Pete and Juliet, the newlyweds; Colin, who’s on a mission to go to America, where the girls he’s sure will fancy him will be, and John, who may be able to simulate sex with a girl, but has no idea how to ask her out.

Clear enough?!

There is, it has to be said, a large and complex assortment of characters, with only one addition I thought ...
...the single greatest gesture of love and the breaking of boundaries is made by a child. That child is Sam, the stepson of Daniel, and it is between the two of them that the heartbreaking truths of love, often disguised as truisms, are brought to the fore. Sometimes they are stated blankly to each other, sometimes they are more subtle and beautiful, as when Sam slips from “Daniel” to “Dad”, an unremarked change, but one that resonates with the tone ... more

I went to see this film just days after watching the disintegration of two apparently solid relationships. Right or wrong, this meant that it became a special film in my mind… it had to reaffirm my faith in love. And it did. Funnily enough, it wasn’t a single one of the romantic relationships that did it, but a simple, moving story between a stepfather and his stepson.

You will probably by now know the general drift of the storyline, but I’ll give you a brief synopsis I can refer to later. There’s the nervous new Prime Minister and Natalie, the tea girl he can’t quite shift from his thoughts; his sister Karen, who’s husband Harry is being resolutely poached by an alarmingly pouty minx; her best friend Daniel, who has lost his wife and finds that his saviour is his son, Sam. Alongside these are Jamie with the cheating girlfriend and the gorgeous housekeeper Aurelia; Sarah, Harry’s employee, whose relationship with the beautiful Karl is destined to remain fantasy if her reality, living with a close relative’s mental illness, proves to stay as painful as it is now, and Mark, who knows unrequited love when he feels it. Dropped in as added extras are Pete and Juliet, the newlyweds; Colin, who’s on a mission to go to America, where the girls he’s sure will fancy him will be, and John, who may be able to simulate sex with a girl, but has no idea how to ask her out.

Clear enough?!

There is, it has to be said, a large and complex assortment of characters, with only one addition I thought to be extraneous and irritating, which was Colin (more later). However, I came to see the complications as the strength of the film, since there was never time to get bored and bogged down in the details of one relationship before moving on to another. Sometimes I felt cheated, in situations where a deeper look at the relationship, harrowing though it may have been, would have made the experience more substantive and emotionally challenging, such as in the Sarah storyline. However, in other little plot-veins like the Hugh Grant Bit TM, I was grateful for the light and deft comic touch and lack of detail, which made the very implausibility of the relationship (which made it so amusing) a strength rather than a flaw.

CAST

Billy Mack (a relative, Kirsty?!) – BILL NIGHY
Joe – GREGOR FISHER
Jamie – COLIN FIRTH
Daniel – LIAM NEESON
Karen – EMMA THOMPSON
Colin – KRIS MARSHALL
Mark – ANDREW LINCOLN
Juliet – KEIRA KNIGHTLEY
The PM – HUGH GRANT
Natalie – MARTINE McCUTCHEON
Sarah – LAURA LINNEY
Karl – RODRIGO SANTORO
Harry – ALAN RICKMAN
Sam – THOMAS SANGSTER

Written by RICHARD CURTIS (Four Weddings, Notting Hill) who also makes his directorial debut.

Original music by CRAIG ARMSTRONG

Quite a who’s who, isn’t it?

It’s hard to say much else about characters without leading inexorably into performances. The big names queue up in this film, and I am forced to approach them in the order in which they touched my heart and I enjoyed their performances. And although the honour of hands-down show-stealer is denied them (it goes to Bill Nighy), I award equal recognition for a job well done to Andrew Lincoln and Liam Neeson. Love, Actually is a kind of Rorschach for the relationship psyche: what role tugs at your heartstrings? Is that how you see yourself? How you want to see yourself? In my case I’d say that I found myself in Mark (Lincoln), particularly as he walks away from a particularly cathartic experience saying to himself: “Enough now.” If I hadn’t been watching with my dad it would have been tears, snot, the whole works. And I advise anyone watching it to allow themselves to negotiate their emotional tundra and see what sets them off – it makes for some interesting navel-gazing, I can tell you.

As for Liam Neeson… The way I see it, it’s a fundamentally important part of understanding the coherence of this seemingly loosely structured film that you recognise that the single greatest gesture of love and the breaking of boundaries is made by a child. That child is Sam, the stepson of Daniel, and it is between the two of them that the heartbreaking truths of love, often disguised as truisms, are brought to the fore. Sometimes they are stated blankly to each other, sometimes they are more subtle and beautiful, as when Sam slips from “Daniel” to “Dad”, an unremarked change, but one that resonates with the tone of the film: so much that is said and so much that is unsaid. Sam’s gesture, in the final twenty minutes of the film, seems to break with the gently flowing yet episodic narrative and all at once you feel like the threads have come together… I’ll say less than I could for fear of breaking the spell of the film, should you see it. If you have seen it, I can tell you that it inspired the class teacher of the Year 6s I’m training with to include “All I Want For Christmas” in our school concert. It was Sam’s gutsy lack of unnecessary cuteness that won the film for me, and that, I think, would not have been possible but for Neeson’s apparently effortless support.

And the leading woman? Could it be anyone but the formidably talented Laura Linney, whose heartbreaking turn as a woman who simply does not see the choices she has in her life was so touching and frustrating and simply incredible? Emma Thompson is also worth a mention here… Karen DOES see her choice, but left open-ended as it is, it’s hard to see if she’s made the right one.

Other notables? Well, certainly Nighy, carousing his way through a career resurrection with his portly manager, beautifully portrayed by Gregor Fisher (I have never understood Rab C Nesbitt, and never will, but who cares when he acts as touchingly as this?!). Downright hilarious and also highly affecting, their great platonic love affair is probably the most genuine and realistic of the film, despite its OTT origins. Also Colin Firth, whose Jamie finally does what he really wants and discovers that far from being the most in demand, what he desired all along was to have no demands made on him at all.

Don’t get me wrong, there isn’t a weak link in the acting, even with My Family’s Kris Marshall (and I do hate that programme), whose character irked me. This was because he seemed to exist entirely to allow Richard Curtis to take a lampooning pot shot at American stereotypes. Now, I don’t hold that stereotypes are an unequivocally bad thing, unless they’re clumsy or offensive. And it’s true that British stereotypes can be painfully clunky (although I’d say between them Richard Curtis and Hugh Grant are probably to blame for generating a few!). But to have a character exist so that you can have a rather one-dimensional comic relief offering (with added bosoms) in the name of redressing the balance is unforgivable. (Disclaimer: this is how it appeared to me, perhaps I misread it, but even then I would say that it was subconscious). There is an extremely funny, extremely pointed and extremely well constructed attack on the Brit-US “special relationship” which I think neatly character-assassinates both sides of the equation, and that is so spectacular (thanks largely to Billy Bob Thornton’s sleazy cameo as the US President and the fact that Tony Blair is such an easy target) that Colin seems a cheap and unnecessary diversion.

There is something of a generally sleazy streak to this film (I put it down to Ben Elton’s influence in the Blackadder days). Ironically (and, I’d say, deliberately) this is least manifest in the gentleness of the porn-star scenes, but I suppose one could shrug and say that sleaziness is a part of relationships, and we have to live with it (and indeed enjoy it!). I would say that’s probably its weakest feature, along with some overly rushed stories. You do have to compromise and jettison depth for breadth in a film like this, so Alan Rickman’s seductive secretary become rather one-dimensional, and the Prime Minister-tea girl relationship feels a bit rushed, even if Hugh cutting a rug in Number 10 does go down in film history. I could happily now launch into a discussion of Hugh and Martine (who is deft and funny and sexy) and from there over to Colin Firth, but if I do that we’ll all be here all day, and I don’t see that it’s necessarily useful to you to go into the minutiae of what I thought of the acting of each and every person. Suffice to say, it was pretty damn good.

The other thing that was pretty good was the direction, Richard Curtis finally, famously, taking over the director’s chair himself. There are no real surprises here… when it comes to episodic narratives the word Altman is generally flung about. Not being well-versed enough to make an accurate comparison, all I will say is that if Robert Altman is the benchmark, then I doubt Curtis has quite hit it, but that’s not to say there aren’t some very beautiful and considered shots. I think I will always remember the view through the decorative shutter of Jamie’s country house… The decision to bookend the film with shots of Heathrow arrivals was sweet and effective, and allowed Curtis to literally zoom his camera in and out of real life, and make his point about the different kinds of love, some of which we take for granted. Curtis helps himself with the use of a cracking soundtrack, with lots of girly tunes from now and then, from Kelly Clarkson to Joni Mitchell, who, along with Billy Mack’s in-joke laden cover of “Love is All Around” (“we took out the word “love” and added the word “Christmas”) lend a nostalgic feeling to the whole; it is almost ten years since Four Weddings, and we’ve gone full circle, in a way.

So what, when it comes down to it, does that long and dithering ramble mean, Alex? Apart from the fact that this is an appallingly complicated film to review, that is. Well, it means I liked it a lot. There were an awful lot of important things said and implied if you were prepared to look and listen (it wasn’t always the obvious). A word I feel I’ve used a lot but can’t get away from in talking about this film is “deft”. That’s how it feels, not slick and flashy, but with a light, understanding and affectionate guiding hand steering it this way and that.

Trivia moment: Daisy, Karen’s daughter, is played by Lulu Popplewell, who was the voice of Lyra in the dramatisation of His Dark Materials I reviewed!

The important bits:

Run time: 135 minutes
Certificate: 15 for nudity and swearing.

So, do I see stars? Yes, four. Somehow I’m loathe to give it five, and it’s hard to explain why… maybe because I felt it was a little overlong (I think two hours is generally the maximum for this kind of film), certainly because I felt that I would rather have seen more of Billy Bob and Rowan Atkinson’s inevitable but hilarious cameos than Colin and his bevy of broads. So four it is, and it would be an extra half if I could add it.

And do I recommend it?

In the words of Arkansas because I found it very funny when he said them:

Abso-f*ckin’-lutely.

Thanks for reading!

Alex
xxx 

...less