Love Actually (2003)

Official trailer

Love Actually is Richard Curtis’s 2003 British romantic comedy depicting multiple interconnected London relationships unfolding across the five weeks leading up to Christmas, from the new British Prime Minister falling for his junior staff member to schoolchildren’s first crushes. Hugh Grant plays the Prime Minister David. Liam Neeson plays Daniel. Emma Thompson plays Karen. Alan Rickman plays Harry. Colin Firth plays Jamie. Andrew Lincoln plays Mark. Keira Knightley plays Juliet. Bill Nighy plays Billy Mack. Martine McCutcheon plays Natalie. Laura Linney plays Sarah. Rodrigo Santoro plays Karl.

Heike Makatsch plays Mia. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Peter. Richard Curtis wrote the screenplay. Working Title Films produced the film, and Universal Pictures released it in November 2003. Love Actually was Curtis’s directorial debut after extensive screenwriting work on Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones’s Diary.

I enjoy Love Actually more than my better judgment says I should. Half of it delights me and one scene devastates me, and the other half embarrasses me. Curtis throws so much at the screen that enough of it sticks, and the good material is good enough that I forgive a lot.

Curtis’s Love Actually has become a deeply divisive Christmas film in the canon. Defenders cite its ensemble structure, Curtis’s screenwriting craft, the strong individual performances, and the real emotional moments scattered across its nine interlocking plotlines.

Critics cite its tonal inconsistencies, the problematic gender politics in several plot lines, the weakness of certain story branches against the strength of others, and the structural problem that nine plotlines compressed into one running time can’t give any individual line full development. Both positions have real textual support.

The film’s long-running annual broadcast position suggests that its package of strengths and weaknesses produces a viewer reward that overcomes its structural problems.

The Multiple-Plotline Structure

Curtis’s screenplay organizes nine separate romantic stories into a single film through Christmas-season setting, occasional character crossover, and a final-act airport convergence. Each story gets approximately twelve to fifteen minutes of total running time, with some lines getting more weight than others based on Curtis’s apparent investment in the distinct material.

The structure produces both the film’s appeal and its problems. Viewers connect with whichever plotlines speak to them and tolerate the others.

The structure prevents any single plotline from receiving the development it would need in a focused two-hander romantic comedy. Some lines feel underdeveloped (Sarah and Karl, Colin and the American women) and some feel overdeveloped relative to their dramatic substance (Mark and Juliet’s silent obsession).

I’d have cut two of the nine stories outright and given the time to Karen and Harry. Sarah and Karl deserve far better than the scraps they get, and the film would feel less like a sampler box if it trusted fewer people with more room.

The Standout Performances

Emma Thompson’s Karen has become the film’s most appreciated performance, and I think she’s the best thing in it. Her Joni Mitchell bedroom scene, after she discovers her husband Harry’s apparent affair with his secretary, is the strongest acting I can think of in any romantic comedy of that period. Thompson plays the controlled devastation of betrayal with a restraint that the broader film around her makes more powerful. That scene is the reason the film gets a 7 from me instead of something lower.

Bill Nighy’s Billy Mack, the aging rock star promoting a cynical Christmas-novelty cover of ‘Love Is All Around’, gives the film its other consistently strong note, and he’s the one who makes me laugh out loud. His deadpan publicity-tour interviews are a joy, and his Christmas Eve recognition of his decades-long friendship with his manager is the warmest moment in the picture for me. Both performances raise everything around them.

The Problematic Lines

Several plotlines have aged poorly. Mark’s silent obsession with his best friend’s wife Juliet has been criticized for normalizing romantic pursuit of unavailable women.

The Prime Minister’s relationship with his junior staff member Natalie raises power-dynamic concerns the screenplay doesn’t address. The screenplay presents Harry’s emotional affair with his secretary Mia partly as Harry’s mid-life crisis instead of as the betrayal of his wife Karen that the Thompson performance makes clear.

The Mark and Juliet line makes me squirm. The film plays his silent obsession with his best friend’s wife as longing, and I find it creepy. The Prime Minister and Natalie bother me less, though I wish the screenplay had asked even one question about the power gap between them.

Curtis acknowledged in later interviews that some screenplay choices reflected 2003 gender-politics assumptions that have since been revised. The film’s continued annual broadcast against these criticisms suggests that audiences are capable of holding its strengths and problems at the same time instead of rejecting the production wholesale.

Is Love Actually worth watching?

Thompson and Nighy earn most of the 7 I give Love Actually.

Curtis’s writing sparkles in the best stretches and the Christmas warmth is real, so I’m happy to sit through the weaker lines to get to them. What keeps it from climbing higher is the pile of underdeveloped stories and the gender politics in the Mark, Harry and Prime Minister lines, which I can’t watch without wincing. Recommended with caveats.

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