Love Actually 

Directed and written by Richard Curtis

Starring: Hugh Grant, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson and Keira Knightley

Rated R for sexuality, nudity and language.

Runtime: 135 min

Producers Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner pulled out all the stops with this mother of all romantic comedies set in London (and the prime minister’s pad, no less).  It must have been hard for Bevan and Fellner to conjure up something better than their previous hits, which include “About a Boy”, “40 Days and 40 Nights”, “The Man Who Wasn't There”, “Bridget Jones's Diary”, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, “High Fidelity”, “Notting Hill”, “The Hi-Lo Country”, “The Big Lebowski”, “Fargo”, “Dead Man Walking” and “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” but they gave it a good shot with “Love Actually” and its legion of actors numbering somewhere around 125.  Both Bevan and Fellner are currently working with writer/producer Richard Curtis on “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” to be released in 2004.  These are not men engaged in low-budget film enterprises.

Given the 125 actors, the eight producers and the twelve love-related singles/couples that make up the movie, it isn’t surprising that it is a flurry of activity.  If you like those tender, dreamy plots like “Sleepless in Seattle” or “You’ve Got Mail,” you better make this a video weekend because this is not the show for you.  The frenetic pace is more reminiscent of Busby Berkely, substituting walking and talking for the singing and dancing.  If you multiply Neil Simon’s four-couple “California Suite,” by three and add thirty minutes to the run time, you have this movie.

But it has something else in common with the early musicals such as Berkeley’s, namely, the almost total absence of anything resembling a plot.  At least a rational plot that might actually happen on this side of Alpha Centauri.  Hugh Grant does the heavy love-lifting as the newly-elected prime minister who falls head-over-heels for one of his staff members on the first day of his arrival at  #10 Downing St.  OK, since the Clinton administration we all know that happens (if we didn’t already know it from the Kennedy Administration…or the Jefferson…).  But on the first day?  Don’t they look down on that kind of thing in Great Britain?  Far be it for me to judge…

But moving beyond the chauvinism of the PM bowling over the girl next door, Grant and his love interest (ably played by Martine McCutcheon) kick off the action with a little word play that comes off as very sweet, or very dumb, depending on your mood.  But your mood is likely to be good at this point because you’ve only seen the first 10 minutes of the 135 minute rom-com extravaganza.  By the last twenty minutes most of the audience just wants to see the people pair up, file into the Ark two by two and sail off into the sunset.

Playing Hugh Grant’s sister, Emma Thompson brings a thread of reality into the show as her husband (Allen Rickman) strays into the arms of the most outrageously forward secretary the world has ever seen.  Do secretaries like this exist any more?  I thought they had been outlawed, at least by common sense if not marital vows.  Thompson more-or-less makes up for the absurdity of Grant’s shtick by accomplishing a very real performance about a very real tragedy, a mid-life crisis that ends in and ill-considered and guilt-ridden relationship.  Her passage in and out of the interwoven stories helps to ground the movie and also helps us to appreciate the other eleven stories that have the happiest of happy endings.  In the same way, Liam Neeson’s conversations with his young son (Thomas Sangster) after the tragic death of a loved one inject some genuine feeling into the smugness that makes up most of the film.  Is everybody in England this well off?

The stories about the Brit who goes to America to find a lover because American women love English accents, and the aging rock star who makes a come-back in spite of himself are so isolated from the rest of the movie that their very presence is bizarre.  Cutting them from the film had to be an idea that was considered more than once.  The Bill Nighy performance of the rock star Billy Mack could have been made into a movie all by itself; it was that good.  Except he’ll have to find some dialogue with meaning as most of his movie lines were cut out by the censor’s bleeps, as in, “Bleepin’ bleep, bleep, bloody bleep bleep, your mother’s bleeping bleep, bleep….You get the idea.  At any rate, neither sub-plot had any business in the film.  The part about the Brit with the accent should have been made into a Budweiser commercial and shown during time-outs on Monday Night Football.

Keira Knightley is back, fully fledged from her tomboy role in “Bend it Like Beckham” via her role as sex kitten Elizabeth in “Pirates of the Caribbean.”  This is the first of about six movies featuring her that will be released in the next year.  Soccer has been very-very good to her!  If Bill Nighy’s performance of the rock star is the funniest in the movie, Rowan Atkinson’s is second, and only because of its brevity.  He is best known Mr. Bean of TV and the silver screen and pulls off a coup in the few minutes he appears.  The only British actor who appears to be absent from the cast is Sean Connery!

It would be unfair to close without a nod to Hugh Grant, who puts out a very professional performance and makes a good comedy out of a lightweight screenplay.  He is establishing a reputation as a man you can count on.  The final verdict: a must-see performance for romantic comedy buffs.  But run out and get a get a cup of coffee at the 90 minute mark to make sure you last ‘til the end.