Love Actually (dir. Richard Curtis, 2003)
I write this the night of the UK general election. It is bleak. Another Labour defeat and the victory of Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party feels like a capstone to not just a bad year, but a dismal decade. Brexit and the privatization of the NHS are near certainties. Religious and ethnic minorities will continue to be discriminated against. As an American observer, this feels like as much a harbinger of doom for a Trump reelection as the initial Brexit referendum was for the 2016 election.
And what did I do on this miserable day? I watched Love fucking Actually.
Of course that film wove its way into the discourse around the election. It would have to. Love Actually is practically a shibboleth of contemporary British culture. Johnson replicated the most famous and odious scene in the film to push his agenda, while Hugh Grant became one of the most prominent celebrity voices for the now doomed Remain movement.
In the sixteen years since its release, Love Actually has become an institution, beloved and loathed by many. In recent years the opinions from cultural critics and film writers has sharply turned against it. They’re not wrong either. The opening monologue in which Hugh Grant’s prime minister, only known as David [1], evokes September 11th has aged poorly, to say nothing of the veritable catalogue of cishet male narcissism and delusion on display through the film. The prime minister engages in a relationship with a former subordinate after she was sexually harassed by Billy Bob Thornton’s bizarre amalgam of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Jamie (Colin Firth) has a practically colonial ‘romance’ with his Portuguese housekeeper Aurelia (Lucia Moniz), and the final scene of that storyline set in her native country has almost no relationship with reality, but is instead like an imperial British fever dream. Do I even need to mention what’s wrong with Andrew Lincoln’s Mark and Keira Knightley’s Juliet? [2]
There is a scene in this film which begins with “Smooth” by Rob Thomas and Carlos Santana and ends with The Calling’s “Wherever You Will Go.” That should have resulted in a prosecution at the Hague for Curtis and music supervisor Craig Armstrong, but then again, no one ever went there for the Iraq War, so why should I ever expect justice for this somewhat lesser crime against humanity?
I recognize that most of it is bad and ‘problematic’ to use the parlance of our times. It totally is and was at the time of its release. It is sappy and manipulative and empty schmaltz. It is a reflection of all the priorities and insipid instincts of your average Liberal Democrat supporter. It is an almost objectively bad film which cannot remotely compare to other ensemble pictures like Nashville or Magnolia, which could also be called an emotional overwrought, overlong experience like Love Actually, but succeeds by being deeply personal and actually giving the actors a challenge.
And yet, I cannot totally hate Love Actually. I know I should, but I can’t. Call it a character defect, poisonous nostalgia, filmic Stockholm Syndrome, or just a love for Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, and Bill Nighy, but I don’t hate it. I’m like the American women in the film, easily seduced by an accent. It doesn’t matter that I cannot watch either this film or something like Four Weddings and a Funeral without noticing how absurdly rich everyone in it is, or how people of color are relegated to secondary and tertiary roles, because I am a rube, a sucker for this pablum, this obvious, trite shit. I have a diseased brain, and I know it, but I don’t care because I laugh whenever I see the look of surprise from Hugh Grant when his bodyguard reveals himself to sing with a robust baritone.
So things are bad, and things will become much worse. We lurch from one bad decade to the next. Neoliberalism, fascism, global warming, the noose tightening around our throats as we stand on the global gallows. But Love Actually endures because what the fuck else can we all agree on but to watch it around December? It’s no solution, but it passes roughly 135 minutes on our inexorable march toward death.
[1] As in that pig fucker Cameron? Who knows!
[2] Did you know that Knightley was seventeen while filming this? Now you do.
oliveresque 