Love, Actually: Loved...Hated (SPOILERS)

This is one of those movies.

I was around to see it first run when it came out in 2003, and the word of mouth all around me was pretty good. It played a long time in theaters. I was personally advised to see it by someone else who saw it first..and I'm glad I did.

The film has lasted far too long (as both a Christmas movie and as a love movie for the rest of the year) not to have SOME value.

And yet, boy is the hatred strong on this one. More than one critic has called it "Crap, Actually."

Well, sort of yes, sort of no. If its crap it is -- as the rock manager says to his vampirish rock singer boss in the movie -- "solid gold crap."

I'll go on record. I liked it. A lot. A whole lot. And its one of those movies where I have had to ask myself "why?"

I offer these reasons:

ONE: The beginning and the end. The movie opens with heartwarming shots of "real people" greeting each other at the Heathrow airport, and that IS moving. It is moving to see how happy people are to see family, lovers, friends. (The movie skips how SAD it is to say goodbye at airports.)

And then Hugh Grant's narration brings up -- the people who died in the planes on 9/11. Love, Actually came out only two-plus years after 9/11; the tragedy was fresh on people's minds, and to open a "romantic comedy anthology" with such grimness was...brilliant. Because the point WAS well made -- in a world where our day to day existence probably fills us with feelings of anger, hate and envy towards others -- for the people on those planes, that day, their final words were of love. Love matters above all. This "light comedy" starts off powerfully ...and the movie is serious in its foundation.

The end puts all the main characters back at that airport and then roars to its end in multiple real images of happiness at the airport. Full circle. And possible of pulling tears from non-cynical people.

TWO: Really bad dialogue that somehow redeems itself. I think the fact that Love, Actually is a British film, written by a British writer(Richard Curtis, whose opus this is -- he's never bettered it) allows the film to have any number of fairly bad, obnoxious and obvious lines ("This man is one song away from being the Worst DJ in the world...") often delivered in very cloying ways(particularly, I'm afraid, by Laura Linney) and yet...the very weirdness and awkwardness and bluntness of the dialogue somehow makes the movie feel special by the time it is over. More real, perhaps, than with Hollywood's precision honed one-liners (this may be the reason that American attempts at Love Actuallys with New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day failed.)

There's one American film with obnoxious characters and precious dialogue that ALSO surprisingly works -- Terms of Endearment. Though that movie used the tragic death of a young mother and the wily gravitas of Jack Nicholson to make the bad lines bearable.

THREE: A willingness to mix fantasy with reality. Love Actually has the courage to say that some things are very real and painful in love -- and some things could not possibly happen at all -- but let's go ahead and put them in the same anthology movie.

Thus, we can have Emma Thompson's painfully real exposure to infidelity (on the one hand) and the geeky British guy's journey to a Wisconsin bar and a naked night with four supermodel types. Richard Curtis is saying "this is the world I"ve invented, both the real and the unreal exist here."

FOUR: The beauty of intersecting stories and people. These kinds of movies are evidently risky in Hollywood, which prefers hiring one or two stars and surrounding them with supporting players to tell one story. But I myself love these "stories intersect" formats. (Examples include Separate Tables, Hotel, and Airport.)

Its always interesting watching characters in one story have to take "time out" to notice the characters and situations in other stories. Or (as here) to find out that somebody is somebody else's sister or brother or friend but we didn't know the connection. The movie rather beautifully abandons the sad stories to "triple up" the happy stories at the climax, using the soaring music to allow the boy to kiss the girl at the airport; Colin Firth to propose marriage to his Spanish love; and the old rocker Bill Nighy to sing his winning Christmas song while "taking it all off"(with a well placed guitar saving his modesty.)

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