Love Actually review – like a 135-minute trailer for a film called Love Actually | Film

So here it is at last, after the traditional ruthlessly orchestrated PR crescendo of interviews and photo-ops: Richard Curtis’s seasonal feelgood comedy, all done up in red ribbon like a Christmas present. Leaving the cinema, the question that occurred to me, along with Are there no workhouses? and You’ll want the whole day tomorrow, I suppose, Cratchit? was this. Does Mr Curtis have special screenwriting software to produce this sort of thing? Using a Q-tip and bodily fluid, he must have impregnated a disk of the Final Draft programme with his DNA, so that all he has to do is type, say, control-shift-NUPTIALS, to get a complete quirky-yet-touching wedding scene. Or maybe control-shift-PRESSCONF, and we get one of his press conferences with a coded public declaration of love. Perhaps apple-control-SIBLING generates a scene with a trademark disabled sibling or loved one, or maybe he just types alt-ROMCOM and the entire movie comes chuntering out of the printer, while Curtis slopes off to watch the rugby on television.

Well, you could do worse, and Love Actually is put together with professionalism and care. It’s a multi-strand comedy with eight or nine interwoven little storylines – Curtis’s first film in the director’s chair. Hugh Grant plays a stammering fortysomething who is the first bachelor to become prime minister since Edward Heath. He falls in love with his tea-girl, winningly played by Martine McCutcheon, who is, however, the only one bothered about making this whole situation believable; Grant himself looks at both Martine and files marked “Treasury” with the suppressed quizzical smirk of an actor who is clearly going to burst out laughing the moment he hears “Cut!” At any rate, both his gallantry and his patriotism are tested when a visiting American president, played by the always charismatic Billy Bob Thornton, makes Clintonian advances to our Martine.

As for the rest, there’s just too much to describe: an array of chocolate-covered, bite-sized, softcentred mini-plots, a Cadbury’s Cameo Selection of stars. And overseeing them all, like a raddled old good-ish fairy, is Bill Nighy, playing a superannuated rocker hoping to get a Christmas number one with his cynically repackaged version of Love Is All Around. The good news about Love Actually is that Nighy is barnstormingly brilliant: hilarious in every scene with a cracker of a laugh in every line. His performance, full of twitches, flinches and naughty-boy grins, is pitch-perfect. And his final mumbling declaration of non-sexual love for his manager, played by Gregor Fisher, interspersed with embarrassed air guitar arm-movements, is the funniest and sweetest thing I’ve seen on screen all year.

The bad news is that everything else is rubbish. Well, not all of it, and not total rubbish, but none of the little plots is all that funny or humanly convincing and none has room to breathe or develop. Nothing has the dramatic punch of the aborted Duck-Face marriage in Four Weddings or the real poignancy of Julia Roberts being turned down by a heartsick Grant in Notting Hill. Here, each pseudo-story seems to cut straight from the premise to its unearned euphoric resolution, with no narrative dimension whatever. No sooner have we been introduced to the characters than it’s time for the big declaration of love in a public place, or the big rush to the airport. “We’ll go to the airport!” says someone to a London taxi driver. “I know a shortcut!” Sure you do. This whole movie is shortcuts, but not like Robert Altman. It’s more like watching a 135-minute trailer for a film called “Love Actually”.

Talking of that “shortcut” to Heathrow, there’s the much-discussed question of what planet Richard Curtis characters are from. Like Ford Prefect in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, they may be aliens posing as Brit Humanoids, but giving themselves away though little slips. They have a special weird way of swearing. “Fuck-wank-bugger-stinking-arse-head’n’hole!” shouts Bill Nighy – funnily, but very, very eccentrically. Martine McCutcheon actually says: “Oh – piss it!” which nobody has ever said in real life. The strangest Curtis replicant is that adorable little boy who plays the stepson of Liam Neeson, recently widowed. What a dark-eyed, frizzy-haired cutester he is. I am prepared to accept that he is chirpily and heartwarmingly courageous about the death of his mum. Fine. But don’t tell me he’s a carbon-based Earth life form. I don’t think I have been so blood-freezingly afraid of any alleged child since those kids in The Village of the Damned.

There are a few more things to write home about in Love Actually, actually. Emma Thompson has a nice moment as Alan Rickman’s wronged wife, slipping away from the family celebrations to control her secret tears by the marital bed. Hugh Grant is always good value, and Martin Freeman and Joanna Page do very well as a couple who fall in love while working as stand-ins for what is apparently an expensively produced hardcore porn film.

But Grant provides a curious voiceover for the beginning and end scenes set at the Heathrow arrivals gate, showing ordinary non-stars on video, joyfully reunited like a BA advert. People still love each other, he says, and even claims that love is the take-home message from the World Trade Centre attack: “As far as I know, none of the phone messages from the planes were messages of hate.” Was there no one who could have dissuaded Richard Curtis from including that icky, disingenuous line?

The career of this uniquely clever and talented man is practically all that we have left from the 1990s wave of hope for a native film-industry to rival Hollywood. Curtis has hinted that he wants to branch out into something more serious. I look forward to that. Because this kind of comedy has just hit the wall.

So here it is at last, after the traditional ruthlessly orchestrated PR crescendo of interviews and photo-ops: Richard Curtis’s seasonal feelgood comedy, all done up in red ribbon like a Christmas present. Leaving the cinema, the question that occurred to me, along with Are there no workhouses? and You’ll want the whole day tomorrow, I suppose, Cratchit? was this. Does Mr Curtis have special screenwriting software to produce this sort of thing? Using a Q-tip and bodily fluid, he must have impregnated a disk of the Final Draft programme with his DNA, so that all he has to do is type, say, control-shift-NUPTIALS, to get a complete quirky-yet-touching wedding scene. Or maybe control-shift-PRESSCONF, and we get one of his press conferences with a coded public declaration of love. Perhaps apple-control-SIBLING generates a scene with a trademark disabled sibling or loved one, or maybe he just types alt-ROMCOM and the entire movie comes chuntering out of the printer, while Curtis slopes off to watch the rugby on television.

Well, you could do worse, and Love Actually is put together with professionalism and care. It’s a multi-strand comedy with eight or nine interwoven little storylines – Curtis’s first film in the director’s chair. Hugh Grant plays a stammering fortysomething who is the first bachelor to become prime minister since Edward Heath. He falls in love with his tea-girl, winningly played by Martine McCutcheon, who is, however, the only one bothered about making this whole situation believable; Grant himself looks at both Martine and files marked “Treasury” with the suppressed quizzical smirk of an actor who is clearly going to burst out laughing the moment he hears “Cut!” At any rate, both his gallantry and his patriotism are tested when a visiting American president, played by the always charismatic Billy Bob Thornton, makes Clintonian advances to our Martine.

As for the rest, there’s just too much to describe: an array of chocolate-covered, bite-sized, softcentred mini-plots, a Cadbury’s Cameo Selection of stars. And overseeing them all, like a raddled old good-ish fairy, is Bill Nighy, playing a superannuated rocker hoping to get a Christmas number one with his cynically repackaged version of Love Is All Around. The good news about Love Actually is that Nighy is barnstormingly brilliant: hilarious in every scene with a cracker of a laugh in every line. His performance, full of twitches, flinches and naughty-boy grins, is pitch-perfect. And his final mumbling declaration of non-sexual love for his manager, played by Gregor Fisher, interspersed with embarrassed air guitar arm-movements, is the funniest and sweetest thing I’ve seen on screen all year.

The bad news is that everything else is rubbish. Well, not all of it, and not total rubbish, but none of the little plots is all that funny or humanly convincing and none has room to breathe or develop. Nothing has the dramatic punch of the aborted Duck-Face marriage in Four Weddings or the real poignancy of Julia Roberts being turned down by a heartsick Grant in Notting Hill. Here, each pseudo-story seems to cut straight from the premise to its unearned euphoric resolution, with no narrative dimension whatever. No sooner have we been introduced to the characters than it’s time for the big declaration of love in a public place, or the big rush to the airport. “We’ll go to the airport!” says someone to a London taxi driver. “I know a shortcut!” Sure you do. This whole movie is shortcuts, but not like Robert Altman. It’s more like watching a 135-minute trailer for a film called “Love Actually”.

Talking of that “shortcut” to Heathrow, there’s the much-discussed question of what planet Richard Curtis characters are from. Like Ford Prefect in The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, they may be aliens posing as Brit Humanoids, but giving themselves away though little slips. They have a special weird way of swearing. “Fuck-wank-bugger-stinking-arse-head’n’hole!” shouts Bill Nighy – funnily, but very, very eccentrically. Martine McCutcheon actually says: “Oh – piss it!” which nobody has ever said in real life. The strangest Curtis replicant is that adorable little boy who plays the stepson of Liam Neeson, recently widowed. What a dark-eyed, frizzy-haired cutester he is. I am prepared to accept that he is chirpily and heartwarmingly courageous about the death of his mum. Fine. But don’t tell me he’s a carbon-based Earth life form. I don’t think I have been so blood-freezingly afraid of any alleged child since those kids in The Village of the Damned.

There are a few more things to write home about in Love Actually, actually. Emma Thompson has a nice moment as Alan Rickman’s wronged wife, slipping away from the family celebrations to control her secret tears by the marital bed. Hugh Grant is always good value, and Martin Freeman and Joanna Page do very well as a couple who fall in love while working as stand-ins for what is apparently an expensively produced hardcore porn film.

But Grant provides a curious voiceover for the beginning and end scenes set at the Heathrow arrivals gate, showing ordinary non-stars on video, joyfully reunited like a BA advert. People still love each other, he says, and even claims that love is the take-home message from the World Trade Centre attack: “As far as I know, none of the phone messages from the planes were messages of hate.” Was there no one who could have dissuaded Richard Curtis from including that icky, disingenuous line?

The career of this uniquely clever and talented man is practically all that we have left from the 1990s wave of hope for a native film-industry to rival Hollywood. Curtis has hinted that he wants to branch out into something more serious. I look forward to that. Because this kind of comedy has just hit the wall.