Love Actually (2003)

Starring: Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, Laura Linney, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightley, Martine McCutcheon, Bill Nighy, Rowan Atkinson, Lúcia Moniz, Thomas Sangster, Gregor Fisher, Andrew Lincoln, Kris Marshall, Heike Makatsch, Martin Freeman, Joanna Page

Director: Richard Curtis

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Romance

Rating: A

"Let's go get the shit kicked out of us by love"

Love is all around.  That is, very literally, the message of the 2003 film Love Actually.  The thing is, however, that this film isn't just about romantic love, although that does feature rather heavily, as it looks at the love between lovers, friends, and family.  There's even the loss of love and unrequited love and the whole shebang.  Love is all around.

The film follows a collection of people, all intricately connected to one another.  David (Grant) is the newly elected Prime Minister of Great Britain, and develops an attraction for a new junior member of his staff, Natalie (McCutcheon).  David's sister, Karen (Thompson), is having problems in her marriage - although she's not entirely aware of it yet - as her husband, Harry (Rickman) is enticed by his flirtatious new secretary Mia (Makatsch).  Also working for Harry is Sarah (Linney) and Karl (Rodrigo Santoro).  Sarah is in love with Karl and has been since she started working at the company, although neither she nor Karl have made any moves yet.  Karen's friend Daniel (Neeson) is newly widowed and unsure of how to help his stepson Sam (Sangster), who has fallen in love with classmate Joanna (Olivia Olson).  Sarah's friend Jamie (Firth) has discovered that his girlfriend is sleeping with his brother and in order to deal he retires to his French cottage, where he meets Aurélia (Moniz), who only speaks Portuguese.  Jamie and Sarah both attended the wedding of Juliet (Knightley) and Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor).  Juliet has long thought that Peter's best friend Mark (Lincoln) hated her, when in actuality he's been in love with her this whole time.  Also at the wedding is Colin (Marshall), a British man who has decided to go to America where his accent will instantly make him a hit with the ladies.  His friend Tony (Abdul Salis) doesn't believe this is the best idea.  Tony is the production assistant of a film where John (Freeman) and Judy (Page) are body doubles for a sex scene.  Overseeing it all is rock and roll legend Billy Mack (Nighy)'s attempt to have a #1 Christmas hit, a variation of The Troggs' "Love is all Around".  Billy Mack's one friend is his longtime manager Joe (Fisher).  Oh, also, there's minor character Rufus (Atkinson) who provides a couple antics and was initially supposed to be a Christmas angel before being dropped as such - I still like to think of him as one.

This is the kind of film that movies like New Years Eve, Valentine's Day, and What to Expect When You're Expecting all try to be.  Centred around one common theme it tells the story of a bunch of different people who are all connected but at the same time unrelated.  There's the perfect amount of characters here, with the story focusing heavily on some and not so heavily on others.  There are no real twists, you can see the endings that end up happening coming for miles, but it's not really a movie that needs twists.  Each of the storylines is absolutely awesome and each of the characters is great.  Even John and Judy, who get the briefest of scenes, have the feel of being these thoroughly developed characters.  You know that they exist outside of the sex acts that they're miming.

The other thing that I really like about the film is that while you can see the endings coming, some of them aren't necessarily the ones that you want to see happen.  I always feel a but guilty as I watch the Mark/Juliet/Peter triangle, because no matter how much I know Juliet and Peter are in love and even though I think Peter's a great guy, I want Juliet to leave him and hook up with Mark.  At the same time, I want Harry to smarten up and be with his wife.  I don't care so much about some plots - like the Colin one, which I think was just for laughs, or the Sam one, which I think is a bit cliched - but Love Actually is more than just the sum of its parts.  It's just sheer awesomeness.

In addition to being a story about love, this is also a comedy, to which it does so rather nicely.  The amount of comedy is different in each plot, and to an extent so is the style, but somehow it works here.  Even with their differences, they all seem to work well together, they mesh like a really good collage - like a puzzle depicting a picture of Mickey made out of a bunch of smaller images of scenes from Disney movies.  The one-liners keep on coming in this one, as do the little scenes that are just hilarious.  If you haven't seen this movie yet, I recommend you at least look up the image of Hugh Grant dancing to "Jump (For My Love" by The pointer Sisters.