24 Dec Love Actually (2003)

Structured Simultaneity

I am a sucker for date movies: I laugh and cry – especially cry – along with the rest. And then feel violated afterwards by the asymmetry of reward: they get my money time and a piece of my soul and I get useless platitudes.

This case is no different so far as formulaic and trivial romance. That’s the nature of film love. But I did get something different here that made this worthwhile: competent writing for once.

And yes, much of the writing – the structure I mean – is formulaic, but it was so well done. The matter is ordinary, but the manner of the machinery was novel.

This film follows several recent experiments in presenting several stories that annotate one idea. The principle is that film abstracts and reduces, so if you want to get depth, you have to combine several reductions. ’13 Conversations About One Thing,’ ’Things You Can Tell By Just Looking At Her,’ ‘Ten Tiny Love Stories’ and several others follow this route.

The idea is that there is one prototypical woman, or couple. What you see as narrative are different dimensions of that. The problem for the writer is one of folded structure. Each individual story has to engage and have a dramatic arc, because that’s where the viewers’ attention will be.

But the whole composition has to be woven into one experience, and that needs traditional cinematic shape as well.

To help with this, the writer Curtis has pulled a number of tricks:

• this is a piece of film writing, so some of his characters are in film (the sex body doubles) or writers (Firth) or in publishing (Rickman and his company including Linney). The Nighy character is a performer as well, often on TeeVee and provides the structural link to…
• the tremendously effective integration of song and narrative. Song interfaces with the story in as many ways as there are stories: as traditional background, as a plot point: Joanna and Billy Mack, as a plot action (the kids, Grant’s two adventures), as both in the Joni Mitchell bit.. And on and on in so many ways this could be as varied with song narrative as ‘Citizen Kane’ meets’ Singing Detective.’
• -The art of ‘bracketing.’ That’s where you set outposts that are intended to be different and unsuccessful so that the middle is raised. For instance, the ’love’ is bracketed on one side by the absurdly fantastic Wisconsin sequence and the heavily U.N. Date- movieish Linney problem with her brother. These were supposed to stand out, be different in tone and outside the main machinery.

Other bracketing is obvious: the easy sex/love (Liam meets Claudia) and the seemingly impossible in the rock star’s. This latter is emphasised in his sexy vixen video. And again between the love without sex (the love for the best friend’s wife) and the sex without love (the body doubles).

Yes, this is all known and taught. But it is good to see it all pulled off.

The director Curtis pulls a great strategy:

• write something extremely tight
• get the most talented and independent actors possible
• get out of their way

One can see that the acting styles here are incoherent. They clearly do not spring from one mind, rather reflect whatever philosophy that actor has. This would be a flaw in another film, but here, the whole idea is to have different dimensions as part of the whole.

Posted in 2003

Ted’s Evaluation — 3 of 3: Worth watching.

IMDB