Rewind Review: Love Actually (2003)

Cast: Hugh Grant, Martine McCutcheon, Liam Neeson
Director: Richard Curtis
Country: UK | USA | France
Genre: Comedy | Drama | Romance

Editor’s Notes: About Time opens on November 8th in North American cinemas. For a review of the film, please read Zoe’s review (74/100).

Every family has their holiday traditions, and this often extends to what movies get watched annually during the winter months.  Roger Ebert once remarked that his family always watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles at Thanksgiving.  Growing up in my house meant repeat viewings of A Muppet Christmas Carol, skipping over the boring love song but rewinding to watch Tiny Tim hack his lungs out again and again.  Since leaving the nest and meeting my wife our tradition has been to watch Love, Actually every year, a film she introduced me to while we were dating.  Like most family traditions, holiday movies can seem inscrutable to the outsider’s eye (I know many people love Planes, but I suffered my way through it with only a few chuckles).  Love, Actually has certainly endured its share of critical hate over the years, and I can understand people’s reservations about the film, if not the vitriol with which they sometimes express these reservations.  See Love, Actually is a bit like dinner on Christmas Day (or perhaps Thanksgiving): there’s way too much going on to savor each bite individually, and some of the component parts might be downright nasty (canned cranberry, anyone?); but if you let the experience wash over you as a whole, there is plenty to satisfy.

See Love, Actually is a bit like dinner on Christmas Day (or perhaps Thanksgiving): there’s way too much going on to savor each bite individually, and some of the component parts might be downright nasty (canned cranberry, anyone?); but if you let the experience wash over you as a whole, there is plenty to satisfy.

The film weaves together nine stories set in London in the weeks preceding Christmas.  Each strand seems to focus on a different variation on the idea of love, some silly and farcical, others more grounded.  The stories do overlap to an extent, mostly through relationships between characters, but there’s never an attempt to go full Butterfly Effect and demand that the stories intersect in meaningful ways.  The characters in the stories have their own private struggles that stay neatly in their plotline, which necessitates quite a bit of jumping around, to the point where the film occasionally feels like an exercise in box-checking.  Some of the stories are slight by design, while others overstay their welcome by quite a bit.  In other words the film by its very nature is lumpy and uneven, not unlike your aunt’s mashed potatoes.

A few of the plot lines stick out as particularly troublesome.  First and foremost is the story focused on Sarah (Laura Linney), a meek American graphic designer who crushes hard on her hunky co-worker Karl (Rodrigo Santoro).  When she finally finds herself in a position to do something about this long-smoldering passion, though, she finds her fling interrupted by her brother, a mentally ill man who calls her incessantly.  The love scene looks like the cover of a bad romance novel, the scenes with Sarah’s brother are painful to watch, and worst of all the film commits the cardinal sin of wasting a Laura Linney performance in a dull and frustrating story.  Though it looks like Jane Eyre by comparison, the plotline that features Colin Firth’s lovelorn author finding romance with a Portuguese housemaid is also a misfire.  It aims for light farce but mostly falls flat, skating by only on the innate charm of Firth.

This raises the broader problem of the film’s humor in general.  Does Love, Actually actually bring the com half to its rom-com promises?  The humor does come across as broad and frankly often a bit corny, such that it might leave you wondering if writer/director Richard Curtis is in fact the same man who gave the world the ink-black hilarity of Blackadder.  The humor that does work comes across mostly as the charming British sort.  Hugh Grant, playing the youthful Prime Minister of England, ends up going door to door looking for his lost love, only to get roped into an awkward version of “Good King Wenceslas”.  Housewife Emma Thompson agreeing to sew costumes for her children’s Christmas pageant, only to discover they will be playing the lobsters who were present for the birth of Christ.  Nothing earth shattering here, but the British tendency towards self-deprecation goes a long way in selling these little odd moments.

In some ways the microcosm of Colin’s story provides a key for looking at the whole of Love, Actually.  As much as I want to give the Grand Inquisitors their due - the film is far from perfect - I think Love, Actually’s critics have in some ways radically misunderstood it.

Two of the smallest storylines get played almost entirely for laughs.  First there’s the meet cute between John (Martin Freeman) and Judy (Joanna Page), who swap small talk even as they go through the motions as stand ins on an erotic film.  This one joke comprises the entirety of their storyline - they pop in at interludes to chat about the weather and traffic while tweaking nipples and the like - but Page and especially Freeman do a good job making it sweetly funny instead of creepy.  The other plot involves woeful Colin Frissell (Kris Marshall) who despairs of finding love in England.  A schemer, he places the blame on English women instead of on his own lack of looks, charm, or basic decency, and resolves to go to America, where he reasons that women will fall all over him because of his British accent.  He flies to middle of nowhere Wisconsin where, lo and behold, he immediately runs into a bevy of eager babes ready to pleasure him.  It’s a supremely silly plot that should not work at all, but I have quite a bit of affection for it.  First, it commits to its zany premise, piling on the ridiculousness with a wink to the audience.  In addition Marshall nails Colin’s character, playing him as a deluded douchebag who thinks he is God’s gift to women when really he’s the sort that everyone mocks in private.

In some ways the microcosm of Colin’s story provides a key for looking at the whole of Love, Actually.  As much as I want to give the Grand Inquisitors their due - the film is far from perfect - I think Love, Actually’s critics have in some ways radically misunderstood it.  Reading through negative reviews I kept seeing the same words return again and again, especially “sentimental” and “sugary”.  First off, can we please retire “sentimental” as an ipso facto term of critical judgement?  Something being sentimental does not make it deficient, either morally or aesthetically.  An excess of sentimentality, sure, but that is true of nearly everything in the known universe.  This usage betrays a certain reluctance by critics to embrace the nakedly emotional.  Call it what you like - embracing emotional complexity is a favored term - but critics tend to shy away from endorsing films that dare display strong emotions at any volume above muted.

This makes the spirit of Christmas very difficult to access for critics.  It is indeed why so many critics fail to properly appreciate Ricky Gervais’ bold Christmas Special for The Office.  After twelve episodes of gloom and awkwardness, people seemed shocked by the sweetness of those Christmas episodes, by the possibility of grace being bestowed upon even the worst of humans and the idea that maybe - just maybe - our endings can be joyful.  This is the hope of Christmas: that in the midst of winter there exists a boundless warmth of joy enough to keep snug the human heart.  Love, Actually, in spite of its flaws, manages to capture that spirit in remarkable ways.  Colin Frissell finds love not just in spite of his shortcomings but because his failings have left him open to receive.  Other characters find themselves in the same situation.

This is the hope of Christmas: that in the midst of winter there exists a boundless warmth of joy enough to keep snug the human heart.  Love, Actually, in spite of its flaws, manages to capture that spirit in remarkable ways. 

Take for example Billy Mack (Bill Nighy), a washed up rock star hoping to make a comeback by baldly cranking out a Christmas version of his biggest hit.  The ploy works as Mack abandons inhibition, speaking candidly and ribaldly about life.  His song climbs the charts and the once forgotten icon regains cultural cache.  In the end, though, he realizes that his one true friend has been there all along - his manager Joe (Gregor Fisher), on whom he heaps abuse.  It’s a fun twist on the mousy girl-next-door trope, but it also shows a man beaten down by his own delusions who finally lets go and accepts the presence of love.  Or take Mark (Andrew Lincoln), smitten by the new bride of his best friend Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor).  He pushes away Juliet (Kiera Knightley) even as he pines for her, unable to resolve the awful tension within.  But, because it is Christmas, he finds himself able to love as he ought, and in a beautiful, wordless scene he makes peace with his turmoil by pouring himself out.

Indeed, for all the accusations of sentimentality and too perfect wrap ups thrown against it, Love, Actually seems well tuned to the idea that sometimes resolution only happens within the self.  In the two most melancholic plot lines we see people making fragile peace with others and the past.  One story focuses on Daniel (Liam Neeson) who mourns the death of his wife but must simultaneously care for his young stepson Sam (Thomas Sangster), a sensitive soul who finds himself smitten with a classmate.  They speed off on a quest to win her heart, but the real story here is the relationship between Daniel and Sam.  They dance around the spectres of the past but have a hard time directly confronting the death in their lives.  Both receive a happy ending of sorts, finding luck in romance, but the love they share for each other, though messy and unspoken, shines brighter than any romantic entanglement.

The story of Harry (Alan Rickman) and Karen (Emma Thompson) is even bleaker.  Long married, they have clearly entered the comfortably not trying phase of their relationship, with Harry devoting himself to the business he runs and Karen taking care of their two children.  Things get shaken up when Harry’s new secretary Mia (Heike Makatsch) turns out to be a brazen temptress, all but ripping off her clothes in an effort to seduce him.  He faces temptation and fails, buying a pretty necklace for Mia.  When Karen discovers the jewelry and figures out it is not for her, her world of secure blandness crumbles.  By the end she has chosen to stay with Harry, but their truce reeks of world weariness; they stay together out of inertia as much as anything.  Sometimes the only Christmas miracle possible is the strength to retreat inward and find yourself there, beneath the layers of accumulated dust.

Christmas is a harbor in the storm, a fire to warm in the midst of winter.  Christmas is (the critics cringe) sentimental.  Love, Actually understands this: it dares to hope, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that, well, love actually is all around us.

As I’ve thought over Love, Actually for this review, the film has brought to mind nothing less than the works of Charles Dickens.  Not that the film approaches Dickens’ level of significance or brilliance, but it does bear some striking resemblances to the great author’s novels.  At points Love, Actually certainly feels plotted by Dickens, a lover of too many story lines stuffed into a story, with no loose threads hanging at the end.  And Dickens has become dreadfully unfashionable, not for his prose (which, though complex, remains sparklingly alive) but for his moral sensibilities, where he dares suggest that humans have good in them, and that life itself can be buoyant, full of joy and hope and (gasp) meaning.  I love the works of Cormac McCarthy, but I despair of a world that contains only literature which conforms to the pattern of McCarthyism.  Bleakness and cynicism pervade our world, and works which suggest that life might be otherwise get laughed off the stage for their sincerity.

That is why we need films like Love, Actually, especially at Christmas.  We need reminding, in the midst of deep troubles around us, that there remains deep, unalloyed goodness in our midst.  Peel away the cynical consumerism which blankets the ritual, and you find the grace involved in the act of giving a gift freely, with no expectation of return.  Christmas is a harbor in the storm, a fire to warm in the midst of winter.  Christmas is (the critics cringe) sentimental.  Love, Actually understands this: it dares to hope, despite ample evidence to the contrary, that, well, love actually is all around us.  It’s hard to think of a more appropriate reminder of Christmas than that.

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Asher Gelzer Govatos

Sr. Staff Film Critic. Visit my personal blog at The Erstwhile Philistine

Asher Gelzer-Govatos fell in love with film in high school, where the one two punch of Lawrence of Arabia and The Third Man opened his eyes to the beauty of the filmed image. Asher is the founder and editor of The Erstwhile Philistine, a culture site. He teaches history (including film history) at a charter high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he lives with his family.

Latest posts by Asher Gelzer Govatos (see all)

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