Bad things about love actually

I first made this case in my original review almost a decade ago, and those who want to get a sense of where Im headed are welcome to have a look. But in light of the films 10th anniversary, I wanted to delve a little deeper. So I watched Love Actually again, andto my surpriseI found it even more hostile to the concept of romance than Id remembered.

Well yes, evidently. Over the course of several conversations with friends and colleagues, some of them conducted with good cheer but at high volumeI refer interested parties to the Twitter feeds of Atlantic employees on the afternoon of November 20thit was confirmed to me that a considerable number of people not only consider Love Actually a classic, but go so far as to watch the movie annually as a holiday tradition.

So take the film on its own titular terms. What does Love Actually tell us about love, actually? Well, I think it tells us a number of things, most of them wrong and a few of them appalling. Now, anyone who goes to the cineplex with any regularity knows that the last decade has seen more than its share of bad romantic comedies. But Love Actually is exceptional in that it is not merely, like so many other entries in the genre, unromantic. Rather, it is emphatically, almost shockingly, anti-romantic.

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For those in need of a plot refresher, the movie portrays, by my count, nine principal relationships: between the British prime minister (Hugh Grant) and a young member of his household staff (Martine McCutcheon); between a crime novelist (Colin Firth) and his Portuguese maid (Lcia Moniz); between a graphic designer (Laura Linney) and the colleague (Rodrigo Santoro) on whom shes had a long-standing crush; between a husband (Alan Rickman) and wife (Emma Thompson) stuck in a state of marital ennui; between a widower (Liam Neeson) and his lovesick stepson (Thomas Brodie-Sangster); between a new bride (Keira Knightley) and her husbands best friend (Andrew Lincoln); between an aging rocker (Bill Nighy) and his manager (Gregor Fisher); between two body doubles (Martin Freeman and Joanna Page) simulating sex acts on a movie set; and between a blundering British Lothario (Kris Marshall) and an escalatingly implausible series of American dream girls. There are other subsidiary relationships, but they serve primarily as foils (Rickmans sexually predatory assistant; Linneys needy, institutionalized brother), or to tie the major subplots together.

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Which isand please believe that I am being as diplomatic as I canutterly insane. Begin with the obvious: Love Actually is not, in fact, a holiday-season movie in any meaningful sense. Yes, it takes place in the weeks leading up to Christmas, and it features a Sisyphean parade of pop yuletide ditties. But this is not a movie about peace on Earth and goodwill toward men (or, for that matter, about what toys Santa will be placing under the tree). Insofar as Love Actually conveys the spirit of any holiday, that holiday is Valentines Dayand, indeed, the film served as a model for a few ensemble romantic comedies (Hes Just Not That Into You, Valentines Day) that have since been associated with that date.