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Conservative Central |
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Review: Love Actually |
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by Andrew Stephens 20/12/03 |
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The BBC website says of this film that "romantics will feel their spirits soar." How very, very strange. This is a film which sets out with a serious mission to show that, despite the events of September 11, "love is all around." It fails: writer and director Richard Curtis mostly ends up making an annoying travesty of the idea of love. The film is composed of nine interwoven stories. The stories themselves range from the ludicrous to the merely improbable. None is convincing as a depiction of human love. One story, for instance, deals with two actors who fall in love while making a porn film together. We are supposed to believe that what the porn stars are doing together is entirely irrelevant to their sweet, innocent and nervous courtship. Memo to Richard Curtis: Women in the "sex industry" are mostly brutalised in their feelings toward men by what they do. Love is not so supreme an emotion that it cannot be degraded by how we choose to act. Portraying porn stars as nervous innocents in love is more ridiculous than romantic. Then there is a story about a man whose wife has recently died. The focus on his grief, though, is quickly hijacked by the grief of his eleven year old son, who is not pining for his mother, but for the unrequited love of a classmate. Memo to Richard Curtis: This is both ridiculous and offensive. The prepubescent eleven year old son looks about seven years old in the film. We are supposed to accept that the boy is suffering from the grief of an adult love in the same way that his father is. Then there is the young Brit who believes that his haplessness in love is due to the failings of British women, and that the cure is a plane ticket to America. In what is, admittedly, a kind of fantasy outcome, his wildest dreams come true. Perhaps this story was put in for comedy value, but it adds to the overall sense that the film isn't attempting to engage reality. What underlies all of the stories is the desire to show how love can surprise us in overcoming all. Thus we have Hugh Grant as the British Prime Minister overcoming all sorts of class barriers by falling in love with his very earthy, working class tea lady. Colin Firth on the other hand falls in love with his Portuguese maid despite a total linguistic barrier. An ageing rock star is forced to admit that, despite all his past womanising, his closest relationship is with his pudgy manager. A woman who has a chance to finally win the love of her life, lets it slip due to her love for her psychologically damaged brother. A young man finally begins to win the girl of his dreams soon after she has married his best friend. Is all this romantic? Mostly not, because Richard Curtis takes the idea of love transcending all barriers to such an extreme that the film becomes mostly incredible and degradingly amoral. Perhaps the one exception to this is the story played by Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson. Rickman acts the part of a good man who finally gives in to the persistent advances of an attractive employee. There is a moving scene in which we observe the effect of this on his family when his wife discovers his infidelity. There are a few such moments of pathos in the film, and some of the comedy comes off well, but overall this is a very long, grating and annoying film which is best avoided. |
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