December comes in, Richard Curtis comes on. And for that dizzy month, when you go out into the world, you are able to believe that, twinkling in the lights over streets, “love actually is all around”. It feels wonderful, and you vow to treasure this knowledge in the year ahead. But the resolution is hard to keep – you might even have made it last year too. To hold on to the wisdom of Love Actually or About Time we must understand it: what does Richard Curtis know – and how did he learn it?
Between the apprentice works, Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) and Notting Hill (1999), Curtis learns to state the obvious. Pale watercolours are swapped for the crayon-blue front door, we move from vague country houses to the capital’s most recognisable landmarks, and Curtis begins his habit, against “show don’t tell”, of having characters say out loud, by voiceover or dialogue, exactly what the film means. He liked “I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her” so much that he had another character restate it in the very next scene.
But it was not always “just” Julia Roberts’s Anna standing in front of the boy, and there is also a moral streamlining between the films. Originally, Anna was competing with another woman for Hugh Grant’s William, and Curtis struggled with the script until he understood he needed to remove the rival. “Eventually I just couldn’t bear writing a film where someone really fell in love with someone else, and then just dumped them.” Four Weddings wastes three other hearts in the path of its central romance. Removing the rivalry in Notting Hill shifted the film towards the wisdom of Bill Nighy’s fatherly counsel in About Time: “try and marry someone kind”.
Both Four Weddings and Notting Hill end with the kiss and roll the credits over weddings. But in his 2013 Bafta lecture Curtis distinguished between relationships and infatuations as between “seeing a pretty girl at a party and being there when the same girl has your third baby”. As we pass the millennium, even though Curtis embraces the full schmaltz of Christmas (snowfall, lamplit London streets), he actually diversifies onto more layered, complex terrain.
Adapting someone else’s story for 2001’s Bridget Jones’s Diary gave Curtis room try new cinematic techniques (training montages, vignettes of imagined erotic goddessery, dissolves into Alsatians eating Bridget). And he takes the director’s chair for the first time in Love Actually two years later, ready to deploy the best visual idea in any of his films. The masses of unnamed loves at Heathrow arrivals, from which the film’s plots emerge from and into which they are released at the end, form a genuine metaphor for love’s being all around.
But what does that love look like? Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson’s wounding story is set well into the wearier trials of a long marriage; Bill Nighy’s rockstar has been nothing but the lonely companion of his “fat manager” for years. The film is as interested in friendships, siblinghoods, and parent-child relationships as it is in “boy meets girl”. The most conventional romance, Sam’s playground crush on Joanna, is actually serving as a proxy for an uneasy stepdad and stepson to confess, entrust and share a common grief. Curtis reckoned in 2019 that “The curve of my career is to realise that love doesn’t end at the first kiss or as you walk down the aisle in a wedding. That’s where some of my movies did end. When I went to Love Actually which had brothers and sisters, fathers and sons and married couples… I think I’ve learned that love is a big subject that the traditional shape of a romcom doesn’t quite cover.”
Love Actually insists on the glory of unspectacular lives. But Curtis has become more dismissive of glamour over time. At Notting Hill’s climax, the paparazzi have a structural role: when they turn their cameras on Hugh Grant’s unknown bookseller they anoint him to fame. When he arrives at the airport as prime minister in Love Actually, he hugs his girlfriend, and the cameras are relegated to the background. Curtis is, by his own account, a champion of the everyday: Yesterday’s whole plot insists “isn’t normal wonderful?” and About Time ends with its romantic lead happy in his “extraordinary, ordinary life”. But the complaint lodged, over and over, is that the lives shown are not ordinary at all.
White-collar, propertied, posh – they “roll easy”, as Curtis has said his own did. Indeed, it felt the country itself was on a roll in those affluent New Labour years the films emerged in. A Spotify playlist is titled “Walking through Richard Curtis London… or gazing out of my unrealistically large bay window.” But while Curtis always favours the good life defined between marriage, childbirth, and the funerals of loved parents, concessions to that life’s fragility are made as the films go on. About Time’s edge on Love Actually, if it has one, comes from its handling of misfortune. The script asserts that “the reality of dinner with someone you love at the end of a normal working day is actually what heaven is”, but knows that heaven is sometimes impossible and always precarious. Because Four Weddings concludes with a reel of its characters getting married, Scarlet, Curtis’s prototypical weird sister, is given an unlikely spouse. Her About Time analogue, the hapless Kit Kat, who suffers a careless boyfriend, alcoholism, redundancy, and a car crash, is allowed more space. She doesn’t reach a happy end, or a sad end, or any end. Her father’s advice was only to try to marry someone kind, after all, and her story is not forced into a conclusion. Even her more fortunate brother Tim wins only a delicate and demanding peace; his life is good, but only if can remember to try to appreciate it every day.
Stating the obvious was Curtis’s first lesson, but in a way it is also his last, the one that completes his maturity. You are “very soon making exactly the opposite film to the one that you were intending” he later reflected, ‘‘if the music is jazz where you thought it was meant to be pop music”. Pop songs are undistinguished, very often about love, and so familiar that it is very easy not to hear them. Curtis tells us to turn ourselves into pop listeners, and make the effort of concentration, knowledge and innocence that requires. At Christmas, just as it’s easy to groan at and dismiss the obvious songs we’ve known all our lives, it’s easy to groan at and dismiss obvious people who’ve known us for all of ours. As those songs come on the Christmas radio, as those people come and join us at the Christmas table, we might heed Curtis, and do our best to appreciate them.
Assembling his various reflections, we find him making one argument more than any other, as here, from the foreword to a collection of his scripts: “I suppose the final thing I’d like to say is this – I still believe very deeply in the argument at the top of Love Actually, that love is all around us, friendship too. I don’t buy at all this argument that romantic comedies are deeply unrealistic and sentimental, while violent, angry movies are somehow inherently more true. Statistically speaking it doesn’t make any sense to me that a movie, let’s say, about a runaway soldier in Glasgow shooting a pregnant woman in the head, which has probably only happened once in history, is called searingly realistic, while a film about someone falling in love with someone else and kissing them at the end – which happens hundreds of thousand of times every year – is labelled sheer fantasy. In the face of all the other stuff, injustice, violence and hate, it’s important to remember and celebrate the great counter forces of love and friendship that many, many people experience every day of their lives.”
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