Flak Magazine: Review of Love Actually, 11.19.03

British fluffmeister Richard Curtis wrote the scripts for Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary, which gave him the clout to make his directing debut with another of his bankable scripts. Love Actually, a Christmas sampler of comic love stories set in London, boasts an all-star cast of great British and American actors: Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Laura Linney, Alan Rickman and many more. But while it's consistently interesting and hypnotically watchable, its manipulative techniques should remind us what sort of thing a movie is.

Movies are usually thought of, and often critiqued, as stories. But many of the best films care a lot less about getting the narrative neatly wrapped up than about producing a certain cumulative effect. A great movie is often much more like a poem or an opera than a novel. It relies on music, rhythm, image and thematic repetition and variation much more than on logically developed narrative. In the same way that it's stupid to argue that "Don Giovanni" isn't logically consistent, or that "Rigoletto" would never happen in real life, some films should get a pass on narrative critique: Blade Runner. Memento. Especially Mulholland Drive.

Likewise, none of Love Actually's nine short love stories is developed very thoroughly or thoughtfully; some of the vignettes, however, are poignant because they are hard-wired with "screen magic." As always, the stars on the screen are much better looking than everyday folk. In some cases (Keira Knightley, Martine McCutcheon) they actually seem like computer composites of psychologist-tested physical attractors. But, being good actors and mostly well-directed, the glamour-pusses here can seem both ideal and real, so we naturally pull for them. Curtis also takes care to fill the screen with other attractive stuff too: fabulous clothes, lovely London vistas, sun-filled flats, an idyllic cottage, interesting extras — eye-candy calculated to be both reassuringly familiar, yet spun to be slightly surprising or exotic. (The epitome is a photo exhibition consisting of nudes with Santa hats).

What's more, Love Actually's imagery is complemented by excellent sound; the dialogue is crisp, the voices sonorous with a dazzling assortment of accents, the timing and rhythms precisely right. Many scenes are propelled by music (offbeat golden oldies put to good use) calculated to end-run around our critical faculties and fire neurons in the primitive emotive brain. All this legerdemain can buy a film suspension of disbelief, but it can also degenerate into music video or worse.

It's therefore worth talking about what kind of enjoyment viewers take in Love Actually. Hugh Grant gives us the theme in some narration (spiked with a reference to Sept. 11, 2001) over a montage of warm reunions at Heathrow airport. He concludes, "Love actually is all around us." Carefully considered, this seems about as valid as Love Story's "Love means never having to say you're sorry." Pauline Kael famously said that movie was essentially porn; it just stimulated the lachrymal glands instead of some other ones. And Love Actually often comes close to functioning in exactly the same way. In a normal love story, love takes its switchbacking, oft-reversed course from A to a clever, surprising, satisfying Z, working its way through the whole alphabet. But in Love Actually the stories jump from A, B, C to X, Y, Z. This almost works, because we get a sort of rhyme scheme as the stories go forward — AB AB AB, BC BC BC …. But it's also like the narrative minimalism of real pornography. (Consider Inside Christy Canyon, which uses precisely the same shotgun-started, intercut-anthology structure.) Curtis says Short Cuts, Robert Altman's adaptation of Raymond Carver's minimalist stories, informed Love Actually, but Altman's vignettes are genius because they conjure vivid backstories and trajectories. Curtis' vignettes are about their five or six scenes, period. Wham, bam, scram — don't think about it. In proper smut, a suggestive flash can buy the watcher's keen interest in whether all the abominations will be sampled before the money shot. In Love Actually, a maid's dowdy clothes just incidentally come off, revealing a cool tattoo and hot body to the man of the house; when we rejoin that subplot, we get the foreshadowed consummation faster than you can sample "me so horny." But it's no fun because the reaction has been so mechanically jerked out of us.

The maid's story would be dreadful but for the amazing performance of Lucia Moniz, a relatively unknown actor who somehow transcends cliché to suggest a vital character. Without such a sympathetic actor to carry them, however, the stories wank. Worst is that of Liam Neeson's prepubescent stepson, who's just lost his mother but broods about his unrequited love instead. The stepson seems to have been cast for his irresistible elfin quality and his freakishly big eyes. (Hey, gigantism is a key casting consideration in real porno, too). The beats of his story are: He mopes, he tells why he mopes, he comes up with a plan to learn the drums in two weeks so he can be in the school Christmas show with the precociously eroticized object of his crush and win her heart. And with some hokey slo-mo drama and Sam Cooke in the background, he does so. This story fails to engage sympathy, intellect or the eye and its failure exposes the apparatus of manipulation.

More successful, but still oddly emblematic, is one of the film's best running gags. Two pleasant-looking people seem to be working, for weeks and weeks, as stand-ins on a high-budget porn film. The stand-ins strike up a very normal, very gradual acquaintance (that obviously will lead to very conventional love) even as he's massaging her breasts for the DP's light meter, even as she's on her knees staring into his honeymoon package. It's funny, but it invites the question: Is the writer giving us the elbow and a "How meta!" wink here? In another of the stories, one of buddy love finally realized, the two old mates resolve to consummate it by getting drunk and watching porn on Christmas night. (Fade, mercifully, to another scene.) Is Curtis saying, see, this is what movie love really is, at heart?

Such questions would be hypersensitive were it not for a trend that pervades Love Actually, giving its inciting platitude a nasty edge: Women are treated as interchangeable parts — one is pretty much a stand-in for another. If one dies, cheats on you with your brother, falls for your mate or gets fat, you just get another. Within a few weeks you're right as rain. Love actually is all around, if you are, like most of the men here, a high-status male (a rock star, a prime minister, a successful writer) with the ability to give a gal a leg up to, or at least trappings of, a higher socio-economic stratum. If you're a lower-class bloke, you go to Wisconsin where your accent will convince the natives you're a prince and your Penthouse Letters will come true. This is sure to irritate some viewers; a suspicious number of critics have assured the public that Love Actually is "not a chick-flick," which may be a lift from the marketing kit, but it's clearly truer than intended.

Maybe Curtis would mount a "realism" defense, like a hip-hop misogynist — "Just tellin' it like it is …" — and the evolutionary psychologists claim that women do still reflexively pine for providers. But that doesn't excuse the two-dimensionality of the women in these stories. Even if their quest is the metaphorical white picket fence, the film would be more interesting if they were given some pluck in pursuing it. Even the little drummer boy shows more initiative than the women. They all get some nice star turns and glib dialogue, but here the female singletons' to-do list might read: "1. Wait for Prince. 2. Shag him." The women's stories were reportedly more complex in the script, and indeed it's hard to imagine Thompson and Linney signing up (reportedly at cut rate) to do the stories that appear onscreen. So then it's Curtis the director who left their spines in the cutting room. Let's hope that changes in his inevitable future efforts.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)