If, in the opening moments of the new romantic comedy from Richard Curtis, the man who brought the world “Notting Hill,” “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” Hugh Grant tells you in voice-over that love is everywhere you care to look, well, who are you to disagree?
Odds are, in the case of “Love Actually,” you’re a cynic, a curmudgeon or, quite simply, a realist. As is the norm with most romantic comedies, willing suspension of disbelief should be the average audience member’s cup of high tea, but at nearly 135 minutes of kissing, coupling and coincidences, this slightly overstuffed Christmas stocking presents an awful lot to disbelieve.
This is a film that all but brims over with characters, plotlines and familiar situations. Offering up a concise plot synopsis of this film would waste a lot of ink and might cause this writer to lose his sanity somewhere around minor character crossover No. 15. Let’s keep things simple.
It’s Christmastime in London, and love is, as aforementioned, everywhere. Every minute of this movie is dramedy at its most potent, with couples coming together and growing apart, the lonely falling into and out of love and a bunch of essentially good and likable onlookers either mourning or cheering the results while striving toward happiness of their own.
The comedic charge is led by the ever-charming Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. Grant plays the rookie British prime minister whose political life is not nearly as bothersome as the fact that he’s just fallen in love at first sight with his office’s saucy tea girl. Firth plays the writer who embarks on a whimsical cross-language love affair with his uni-lingual Portuguese maid.
Drama comes from Emma Thompson and Laura Linney, who play, respectively, the prime minister’s sister, whose husband (a perpetually-smirking Alan Rickman) may be on the verge of cheating with a sexy secretary, and a hopeful woman whose fledgling inter-office romance is complicated by her suicidal brother.
And there’s the bittersweet platonic relationship between a newly-widowed man (Liam Neeson) and his 11-year-old stepson, who’s bummed that his mum died, but is more preoccupied with impressing and wooing his school’s unapproachable ‘it’ girl.
There are other plot threads of varying interest, though several-most notably one young Brit’s sexual odyssey to America and the innocent, sexless flirtations between a pair of adult film actors-prove extraneous and should have spent Christmas morning on the cutting room floor. This brings us back to the film’s chief problem: length. Midway through, the film seems close to embracing its theme full steam ahead, showing love honestly, in all its forms-neat, messy, beautiful, ugly, simple and complicated. But, it forgoes this essayistic approach when it still has a dozen or so stories to wrap up and not much time to do it in. However charming it may be, “Love Actually” is a tree in need of trimming.
Still, it’s hard to complain when you ask a chef for a three-course meal and he instead offers up an all-you-can-eat buffet instead.
Curtis makes better mainstream romantic comedies than anyone these days, and “Love Actually” is packed with enough warmth, heart-tugging and genuine laughs to outweigh a hundred wispier efforts of the same ilk (think your average Kate Hudson vehicle). The funny bits are funny, the sweet bits are sweet and the central romances are appropriately charming.
A cheery holiday houseguest that almost but never quite overstays its welcome, “Love Actually” is actually pretty good.