PURPORTING TO BE a big ensemble piece about the many facets of love, "Love Actually" falls short of its lofty goal. It's not just that the movie is too short to give much depth to any of the relationships (although that is a problem). It's that the movie forgets one important area worth exploring: marriage.
The romantic comedy has never been particularly kind to marriage; the purpose of most of them is to tap into the will-they or won't-they aspect of romance that is of little tension in a marriage. So while many end with marriage, or a proposal, or some kind of commitment, it's the road to togetherness that seems more exciting than the day-to-day living out of a relationship.
it's not a conspiracy, of course, it's just the inherent nature of telling stories: conflict and tension make drama, while happiness and steady love are boring. It's that way with all art, since the beginning of time. It's that way in the Bible -- the push-and-pull, up-and-down relationship God has with humans in Scriptures is the driving story, not the moments of peace and connection. Those are the counterpoints, the grace notes, the vision of what our relationship can be.
But I still can't get over that the movie doesn't contain a single admirable marriage. Marriage is part of the film, to be sure, but the one between Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson is threatened to be torn apart by a wandering eye; Liam Neeson spends most of the film mourning his departed wife; Kiera Knightly appears genuinely happy in hers but the story focuses on her husband's best friend, who loves her from afar. Even Billy Bob Thornton, in a cameo as a U.S. President, is a married man who hits on every woman he sees. Collectively, marriage is seen as a burden, a dead-end, a sham, a restraint.
What's so frustrating about this is that the movie starts out with such a hopeful monologue about the fact that love is everywhere, that all you have to do is hang out at an airport and see people greeting their loved ones to know to see that -- despite the hopelessness of the daily news -- there's an overwhelming current of love flowing through the world. The camera captures many of these real-life meetings (you can tell they're real-life because the people are way uglier than any of the cast) to illustrate its point, but you can bet that many if not most of those people were married. The movie claims to be about a world full of ordinary people in love, and I guess that's why, more than most romantic comedies, I find it so hypocritical.
On the DVD, there's a host of deleted scenes that made the film too long, and among those is a one-minute clip of a man in Africa whose crops are destroyed by drought, but who nevertheless finds comfort, laughter, courage and hope from the presence of his wife and kids. It was a beautiful, pitch-perfect scene. I'm not certain where in the movie it was supposed to take place, but to me it felt like the heart of the movie, the hope of the story, ripped out.
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