Richard Curtis' effervescent and enjoyable Love Actually is being hyped as "the ultimate romantic comedy."
That somewhat overstates the case, especially if you mine the history of the genre and revisit classics such as Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday and It Happened One Night, which set a standard difficult for contemporary movies to match.
For one thing, Curtis (famous for writing Four Wedding And A Funeral, Notting Hill and Bridget Jones's Diary), has a sly and dry approach to comedy that is more distinctly British. American romantic comedies are more loosey-goosey.
But Love Actually does share something important with the Hollywood classics: The clever Curtis, who also seems to be a cynic, has the guts to layer tough-love stuff into his comedy without ruining the comic and romantic elements.
That certainly was true in Four Weddings, much less so in the tiresome Notting Hill, but seamlessly back in place for Bridget Jones's Dairy. In Love Actually, the darker moments are so deftly woven into the subtext that you could argue that it is a decent drama as much as it is a romantic comedy.
This is especially true in the purest emotional scene: A quiet moment alone with Emma Thompson, who emotes from a place so deep in her heart that you are reduced to rubble, in a flood of tears, in mere seconds.
The new movie is also a true ensemble with nine parallel stories, each of them exploring a different kind of love. That includes unrequited, unrestrained, impossible, new, old, platonic, purely sexual, screwball and hopelessly romantic. Each segment is loaded with name actors and strong performances.
There are no weak links among Thompson, Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Colin Firth, Laura Linney, Liam Neeson, Martine McCutcheon, Keira Knightley, Rowan Atkinson, Andrew Lincoln, Joanna Page, Kris Marshall, Lucia Moniz, Martin Freeman, Thomas Sangster and Billy Bob Thornton, in an intriguing cameo as a bully-boy U.S. president who gets his comeuppance from Grant as the new British prime minister.
I'm reserving special mention for English character actor Bill Nighy -- who plays a drug-and-booze-addled former rock star who lovingly sends up the late Robert Palmer -- because he gloriously and shamelessly steals this picture.
Not all of the stories work equally well, which is not surprising. Your favourites may tell you as much about you as they do about the movie and about filmmaker Curtis. For example, Firth and Moniz stage one of the most shameless, subtlety-be-damned encounters ever seen in a mainstream movie -- and I loved it. Others may recoil in horror at the manipulation.
The truth is there is probably something for everybody in this movie. If you don't like some segment, and the people in it, just wait a few minutes. The movie switches stories and only brings them all together at the giddy end.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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