Somewhere I wrote that you could forgive Hugh Grant much for Notting Hill. I could also write, I think, that you can forgive Colin Firth much for Pride & Prejudice, and Emma Thompson much for Sense & Sensibility, not to mention Alan Rickman for Die Hard, Quigley Down Under and Sense & Sensibility (and, indeed, we have no doubt already forgiven him for Galaxy Quest, though he may not have forgiven himself …).

We may have to use up some of that stock of forgiveness on this present film, in which all four of these people have roles, though perhaps not too much.

Love Actually, which is short for “Love actually is all around us”, carries us through a set of half a dozen love stories, some of them linked together. There is Prime Minister Hugh Grant, who, upon entering Number 10 Downing Street for the first time, immediately falls for serving girl Martine McCutcheon, a young woman who lies somewhere in that indefinable boundary zone between “voluptuous” and “fat”. There is writer Colin Firth who, betrayed by his girl friend, goes off to France to write and finds his rented house being looked after by attractive Portuguese serving girl Lucia Moniz. Karen, the Prime Minister’s sister, worries (with justification) that her husband, executive Alan Rickman, is being vamped, successfully, by his administrative assistant. Karen’s friend Liam Neeson, a recent widower whom she comforts (in the most innocent of ways), has a young son who has fallen in love with a girl at his school who will soon be going back to America — what is the boy to do? There is also … well, we’ll skip the subplots about the gofer who dreams of infinite sex with beautiful girls and goes off to America to find it ⁽¹⁾, or the two young stars of a porn film who, in what one might assume are the most intimate of moments, can’t find it in themselves to express their real feelings to each other … All of this orbiting around an aged rock star, just out of a treatment program, who hopes to turn a remake of a very old song into a hit and who looks for love in groupies, though perhaps he might find it much closer to home.

All in all, a pleasant movie, but I don’t think that the attempt to juggle all of these stories worked out as well as it might have. Doing away with two or three of them at the script-editing stage might have produced a romance masterpiece.

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⁽¹⁾ He finds it very quickly. I’m not sure that I appreciate this film’s presentation of Americans, though there are some in England who would enjoy the Prime Minister’s press-conference squelching of over-amorous U.S. President Billy Bob Thornton and ending of the “special relationship” between the two countries … Don Harlow, November 16, 2003 02:40 PM

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