Love Actually: Too Neat, Too Long, and Still Worth It

Love Actually opens at Heathrow, at the arrivals gate, where strangers hug and cry and no one is watching the clock. Richard Curtis wrote and directed the film, his first time in the director’s chair, and it runs 135 minutes across ten separate stories that keep crossing into each other. The tagline is “Love actually is all around.” The movie means it, and mostly earns it.

Trailer, via Universal Pictures At Home.

Billy Mack and Joe

Bill Nighy plays Billy Mack, an aging rock star who records a novelty Christmas version of “Love Is All Around” with his manager Joe. Billy mocks the single in every promotional appearance he makes. The song still hits the UK’s Christmas number one.

On Christmas Day, Billy works out that Joe has been the most important person in his life. He skips a celebrity party and spends the holiday quietly with him instead. It is the film’s best arc because it is the one that costs something. Billy has to admit he has been a fool in public for weeks, and the payoff is a quiet room, not a grand gesture.

The Cue Cards

Keira Knightley is Juliet. Chiwetel Ejiofor is Peter. Mark, played by Andrew Lincoln, is Peter’s best friend, and he acts cold toward Juliet from the start.

Then Juliet forces Mark to show her the wedding video he shot. It is almost entirely her face. Mark knocks on her door, says he knows he will get nothing back, and confesses silently with cue cards. Juliet kisses him briefly and goes back to her husband. Mark tells himself he can move on.

Love actually is all around.

That scene is the film’s most quoted for a reason. It is also the one that has aged the worst, and Curtis does not let Mark off the hook for it.

Jamie and Aurélia

Colin Firth is Jamie, a writer who finds out his girlfriend is sleeping with his brother. He goes to a cottage in France to get away from it. There he builds something with his Portuguese housekeeper, Aurélia, played by Lúcia Moniz, though neither speaks the other’s language.

Months later he comes back to propose in halting Portuguese. She accepts in broken English and reveals she has been learning his language too, “just in cases.”

Karen and Harry

Emma Thompson is Karen. Alan Rickman is Harry, the managing director of a design firm and her husband. They have two children. Thompson drew on her own marriage breaking up for the role, and it shows in every scene she is in. Karen is the film’s most adult character, and her story is the one that refuses to tie itself off neatly.

The Rest of the Ensemble

Hugh Grant is the Prime Minister. Martine McCutcheon is Natalie. Liam Neeson is Daniel. Laura Linney is Sarah. The cast is mostly British and mostly made up of people Curtis had worked with before.

The film was an international co-production between the United Kingdom, the United States and France, shot mostly on location in London. It starts five weeks before Christmas and counts down week by week, then closes with an epilogue at New Year.

Curtis’s casting choices were odd in ways that paid off. He told casting director Mary Selway to find someone who would play Billy Mack well but whom he would never think to cast. She suggested Nighy.

Ant & Dec play themselves, and Nighy’s character calls Dec “Ant or Dec,” a joke about how often the pair get mistaken for each other. Jeanne Moreau appears briefly, getting into a taxi at Marseille Airport. Ruby Turner plays Joanna’s mother, one of the backing singers at the school Christmas pageant. Helder Costa, a veteran of Portuguese cinema, plays Mr Barros, Aurélia’s father.

Joe Alwyn read scenes with Grant and Curtis when he auditioned for Sam. Curtis cast his mother-in-law, Jill Freud, as the Prime Minister’s cleaner, and his daughter Scarlett as Lobster number 2 in the nativity play, on the condition that she meet Knightley.

What Holds and What Doesn’t

The film grossed $252.6 million worldwide against a budget of $40–45 million. It got mixed reviews and a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy. It later built a cult following and became a fixture of the Christmas season in both the UK and the United States. A short made-for-television sequel, Red Nose Day Actually, aired in two versions on BBC One and NBC in 2017 for Red Nose Day 2017.

Ten stories in 135 minutes is a lot of ground, and not all of it is worth the time. The Jamie and Aurélia thread works because the language barrier does the heavy lifting. The Billy Mack thread works because Nighy plays a man discovering he has wasted decades. The Karen and Harry thread works because Thompson refuses to make it cute. The weaker threads lean on coincidence and let characters off easy.

The film’s habit of resolving every problem by Christmas morning is the thing that keeps it from being better than it is.

But the reason Love Actually endures is not the plotting. It is that Curtis takes love seriously as a subject rather than a genre. The Prime Minister, a rock star, a widower, a writer and a married woman all get the same treatment: love is inconvenient, badly timed and worth it anyway.

The film is too long, too neat and too pleased with itself in places. It is also genuinely moving in the places that count, and it knows exactly what it is doing at Heathrow in the first scene and the last.

Bill Nighy · Christmas movies · Emma Thompson · Love Actually · movie review · Richard Curtis