It's said that English - read, London-based - movie critics don't like Richard Curtis's films. It's something about the way he doesn't have guttersnipes and pony criminal types yelling at each other all the time. His casts are almost always pretty people who have enough money for poverty not to be the driving force of their lives, and they have good manners, nice voices and a sense of humour.
I'm referring to his three masterworks: Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Love, Actually.
Let's deal with Notting Hill quickly. The only think I can remember from that film with affection is the fruitarian joke: "so this carrot..." "...has been murdered. Yes." The movie ends with Hugh Grant persuading Julia Roberts to stay in England - presumably forsaking not only all others but also her career. This really doesn't happen. In a huge way. A discreet affair perhaps, but not marriage and children. Way too many economic inequality issues. It's a fantasy, but it didn't need to be. The heroine could have been a British actress who went over to Hollywood and had a couple of big movies, but was losing her novelty in and attraction to the industry and was looking for a way out. British actresses who make big time movies have a habit of coming from middle-class places like Twickenham (Kiera Knightly, Clare Forlani) and would plausibly settle for a bookshop-owning Hugh Grant, if there was more money or connections knocking around. With that story they don't get American money for the movie, but you get the point I'm making. Even if we insist on actually Julia Roberts, we could have had a real friendship with a little nookie, and then a to-the-point but kind scene where she has to say goodbye. She can explain that she has obligations "I'm not an actress, I'm a small corporation. Actually, not that small." ("You look petite to me.") Again, you get the point. And you could keep the fruitarian.
But no. Love between pretty people is a fantasy.
Love, Actually was supposed to be a ghastly, sugary Christmas confection with a cast of pretty faces and only one poor person in sight - and she had a job. As Prime Minister Hugh Grant's tea lady. I don't know about you, but the film I saw was a meditation on the hopelessness of love and desire. Skip the Hugh Grant-Martine McCutcheon story - that was there so Griffin Mill could have a happy ending. There's nothing wrong with a happy ending: it lets you get away with all sorts of cynical stuff in the second act.
Quick, name one couple who actually have a believable resolution. That's right, the body doubles John and Judy. Oh, and the Laura Linney character having her life taken over by her brother. Where there is disappointment - the Alan Rickman / Emma Thompson marriage or Colin Firth being cheated on by Sienna Guillory - it's real, and where there is happiness, it's a total and obvious sham. Everything from the idea that there's another woman on the planet who looks like Claudia Schiffer to the idea that hot American girls would fall for a Basildon burke is a rampant nonsense. Sam the schoolboy finally kisses Joanna his American crush as she's leaving the country. This looks like a win if you're really not paying attention. It isn't. She's on the other side of the Atlantic. No Joanna nookie in Sam's future. You just got fooled by that "or you'll regret it the rest of your life" bit. That's a consolation prize. The Hugh Grant - Martine McCutcheon story is there to make the rest look almost plausible. If he'd left it out, the utter unreality of the other stories would be running all over your Christmas cake. This leaves John and Judy. The not-so-pretty real people who are shy but attracted. This is hopeful and believable.
Which brings us to Four Weddings and a Funeral - a film which should live in blessed memory for being one of the very few that actually makes London in particular and Britain in general look like somewhere you might want to live. The prettiest couple in the movie - Hugh Grant and Andie McDowell - are the ones least certain about how they really feel, most distracted by anything else in their lives and most tentative about committing. Kristen Scott Thomas - an Englishwoman so elegant she had to move to France to survive - is hopelessly in love with Hugh Grant, who barely even knows she's there (and it's a tribute to everyone's acting that we believe that). Everyone else, however likeable in short doses, are twerps, shy, dorks, thumping crass idiots and braying shelias - think of the "ghost of girlfriends past" scene (which is the most important in the film). It is such people who fall in love and walk down the aisle - not pretty people with self-doubt. (Note, "pretty people with self-doubt" is a tautology: pretty implies self-doubt.)
I doubt it's the "author's message" that only the crass and the below-the-pretty-line people can fall in love and marry. I'm guessing it's something he's seen and found makes a useful skeleton for a script. It is, after all, comforting for the majority to see themselves winning in the game of love while Hugh Grant only gets to the end in what any fool can see is a fantasy. It lets Curtis set his characters up for us to laugh at them while seeming kind in the end. There is one movie where the pretty people do fall in love, and we believe it, and that's Four Weddings. The last act of that film is one of the neatest pieces of dramatic plotting ever put on the screen. Everything comes out of the characters, which is where good drama comes from, and it calls on a principle we can all believe: if you're not in love, you shouldn't get married.
