Love Actually

The Beautiful, Messy Belly-Flop of Romance

Every December, I brace myself for the same exhausting conversation about *Love Actually*. The internet inevitably drags Richard Curtis’s 2003 behemoth back into court: beloved Christmas staple or awkward relic of early-2000s romantic politics? The honest answer is still both. Watching it again two decades later, I expected a straight shot of nostalgia. Instead, what hit me hardest was how wildly unruly the whole thing is.



Curtis had already done so much to shape the modern British rom-com through *Four Weddings and a Funeral* and *Notting Hill*. With *Love Actually*, he gives up the clean design of a single story and just keeps piling narratives on. There are ten of them here, all elbowing each other for space, from a Prime Minister’s crush to an aging rocker cynically monetizing Christmas. Roger Ebert’s description of the movie as "a belly-flop into the sea of romantic comedy" still feels dead-on, especially when he adds that the film eventually resembles "a little like a gourmet meal that turns into a hot-dog eating contest." That sense of overfeeding is built right into the editing. The movie ricochets from snowy London to a sunny French lake with the concentration span of a child on too much sugar. Whether that speed reads as exhilarating or exhausting probably depends on how much sentiment you’re willing to indulge.



And still, between all the noise and the iffy gender politics (I remain unconvinced that the cue-card scene is meant to feel romantic rather than invasive), the movie lands a few genuinely crushing blows. Emma Thompson is the clearest example. As a settled, middle-aged wife and mother, she has to anchor the film when it risks floating away entirely. Watch her in the scene where she thinks she’s about to open a gold necklace from Alan Rickman’s husband, only to find a Joni Mitchell CD instead.



What wrecks you there isn’t dialogue, because Curtis wisely gives her almost none. It’s all in Thompson’s body. She slips into the bedroom, turns on "Both Sides Now," and stands beside the bed while the truth settles over her. Her shoulders jerk in this painfully specific, graceless way. One hand clamps over her mouth, as if she might physically contain the knowledge that her marriage has cracked open, and then she wipes herself down and resets her face for the children downstairs. Knowing Thompson was drawing from the pain of her very public split with Kenneth Branagh—after his affair with Helena Bonham Carter—makes the whole scene feel even heavier. She isn’t merely performing heartbreak; she’s dragging lived experience into the room.

That may be the real reason *Love Actually* survives all the criticism. It throws out so much—lust, grief, terrible school pageants, language barriers, foolish devotion—that some of it is bound to hit. Half the storylines still make me groan, and yet the swelling score gets me anyway. Curtis isn’t asking for admiration of his craftsmanship so much as permission to dump you into the untidy sprawl of human feeling and see what sticks after two hours.