Love Actually Made $252 Million. It's Still Ten Short Films in a Trench Coat

It's October, and I know it's early, but the Christmas movies come out of the attic earlier every year, like a relative who's figured out where you keep the key. So let's get to Love Actually before it gets to us.

First the case for it, which is real. Richard Curtis, who had written Four Weddings and Notting Hill, made it his first film as a director in 2003. It cost somewhere around $40 to $45 million and made about $252 million around the world. The cast is a list of everybody in Britain who owned a decent coat: Emma Thompson, Hugh Grant, Alan Rickman, Bill Nighy, Colin Firth, Liam Neeson, Keira Knightley. Thompson's scene in the bedroom with the CD is as good as screen acting gets, and Nighy's washed-up rock star is the funniest thing in it.

Now the trouble. It's ten separate love stories, with an epilogue. Curtis originally had fourteen and cut four, which is like a man bragging he only ate ten donuts. Reviews at the time were mixed; it sits at 65 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. The New York Times said it ran as long as an Oscar-bait epic, and a writer at The Atlantic later called it the least romantic movie ever made. Curtis himself called the edit a catastrophe, in 2014, which is a word you rarely hear a director use about a film that made a quarter of a billion dollars.

Then there are the jokes. A good many of them are about a young woman on the Prime Minister's staff being fat, which she isn't. Curtis has said his daughter told him years ago he couldn't use that word anymore, and he's admitted he was behind the curve. In 2023 he allowed that the scene with the cue cards on the doorstep is a bit weird. When the man who wrote the movie is the one handing out the warnings, you've got to wonder who's left defending it besides your aunt and the cable channel that runs it nine times in December.

And the romance itself, the part we're supposed to be crying at, is mostly powerful men falling for women who work for them. The Prime Minister falls for the tea girl. A writer falls for his housekeeper, though they can't speak the same language, which, to be fair, is the secret of a lot of long marriages. It's not love, actually. It's management.

Watch it anyway, if it makes you happy; I'm not the police. But a film can be beloved and still be a holiday fruitcake: heavy, sweet, full of things nobody ordered, and passed around every year because nobody has the heart to throw it out. Tradition is a wonderful thing. It's also how the worst ideas get the best seats.