Love Actually

Written and directed by Richard Curtis

            Love Actually is like a pop love song.  It is a cheesy, feel-good masterpiece of clichés and hooks and pitch-perfect production.  The one thing that separates it from typical pop is its length.  At 135 minutes, and with at least 15 major characters, someone forgot to make a radio edit.
           The opening of the film is a well-cut establishment of many of the players that includes the wedding of Peter and Juliet (Chiwetel Ejiofor and Keira Knightley) and a funeral for the wife of Daniel and mother of Sam (Liam Neeson and Thomas Sangster).  We are then introduced to the new Prime Minister (Hugh Grant) who develops a crush on one of his employees, Natalie (Martine McCutcheon) and his sister Karen (Emma Thompson), her husband Harry (Alan Rickman), and seductive secretary, Mia (Heike Makatsch).  If that isn’t enough, then there’s Jamie (Colin Firth) who catches his girlfriend cheating with his brother then takes a holiday in France and falls in love with a housekeeper (Lucia Moniz) who doesn’t speak English, aged legendary rock singer Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) who is competing for the #1 Christmas pop song and Harry’s employee Sarah (Laura Linney) who can’t seem to have a relationship as long as she’s caring for her mentally unstable brother. 
           There are others and it is worth noting them only because they are completely unnecessary and disconnected.  A young caterer named Collin (Kris Marshall) travels to the United States to get laid and, in a scene so ridiculous I mistook it for a dream sequence, does.  Two film production stand-ins (Martin Freeman and Joanna Page) fall in love while simulating sex in a few of the movie’s most gratuitous sequences.  It is enough that some of the more associated storylines were too unlikely or way too cute,-or, in the case of Rowan Atkinson’s department store gag, too detracting- that Curtis only needed to go so far with his attempts to include every possible situation in existence.
           The two greatest plots involve Grant, ever bumbling and nervous, and Firth, sad-faced and hilariously straight, who are establishing themselves as Britain’s non-silent, non-slapstick answer to Chaplin and Keaton.  Also brilliantly funny is Nighy, a cynical been-there, done-that codger who is offensively the very definition of selfish sold-out has-been.  His story’s conclusion, though, is one of the most unsatisfying. 
           Richard Curtiss, established now as the mainstream Brit-Hollywood cross-over king screenwriter, pulls off a decent juggling act despite the inability to edit out the ineffective.  That which is good is quite good, the jokes mostly natural and funny and the characters mostly real enough without them being given a lot of screen time.  The pacing, with score and soundtrack, is manipulative in its proficiently feel-goodness so much that going in to it too happy can lead to a misery trying to compare your life to the implausibility of love found in the movie.  Still, it plays like an overlong NOW compilation that halfway through, being exposed to so much pop, you want to turn it off and yet you sit through the entire thing, without control or care.