LOVE ACTUALLY (2003) ***1/2 You know, one line of interpretation is that Jesus said that the Kingdom of God is already upon us-here, accessible, we need only reach out and recognize it-and this movie is saying something very similar, very powerful, very pleasurable and edifying. Hugh Grant busts a major, major move with a brilliantly written prologue, and then Bill Nighy moves the thing into hyperspace within minutes. There's no way they're going to sustain this, you think, but they do for a good twenty minutes as Richard Curtis constructs a spectacular human montage with such subtlety and grace, and deftness…that you wonder why everyone doesn't just do it. It never regains that first twenty minutes, but it continues throughout at a very high emotional level, only occasionally weighed down by too many (usually very good; the "usually" suggesting the problem) pop songs, and finishes with a worthy flourish. The temptation is to say that they had one or two story lines too many, and so never developed the best ones as much as I'd like. And that's right, but all of the story lines are very, very good and very well done, and the ones that spoke to me aren't necessarily the ones that speak to you, and certainly aren't the ones that speak to everybody. It's all about how we're all in this together, so wouldn't it be inappropriate and self-centered for me to say they should take out the ones that I don't like as much? So I'm not saying that Curtis plays every intricacy perfectly, but he does close enough that I can't point to any objective flaw. Hugh Grant somehow always ends up in the middle of the best of these overtly-sentimentalist films…and he's very good in them, but I think it's even more a case of him (or someone) recognizing a kicking script. This must have looked pretty good on paper, but it takes a certain very astute mind to see all the possibilities. Hugh's political speech is a wonderful moment in British history, but again, while his delivery was wonderful I think the key was his being in the position of just being that human that the British (and Americans) wish we could figure out how to put at the controls. Hugh's performance is tremendous, but it's Nighy who kicks the thing back into the stratosphere with about as much regularity as opportunity. They are, as I say, surrounded by wonderful performances, at least Emma Thompson, Heike Makatsch, Alan Rickman and Kris Marshall being too good to fail to single out from a most excellent ensemble.
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