There’s a gossip columnist adage that for rapid advancement, choose the biggest target you can and attack.
Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams drove a manicured talon through the callow heart of “Love Actually,” a popular decade-old film which had formerly escaped my attention as putative challenger to “It’s a Wonderful Life” for compulsory Christmas viewing.
I’m beholden to prominent columnists for their scalpel dissections of films I barely remember. I immediately watched it again, determined to re-forget this forgotten trifle with purposeful contempt and to prevent further unworthy ascent in the Christmastime lineup.
There was less tea in it than promised and I sort of loved it.
I fault Bill Nighy. His subplot anchors the whole info-overload extravaganza. Nighy’s hysterical desiccated dervish rocker bids for the year’s biggest Christmas hit with “This is shit, I know it and you do, too, but selling it hard, fast and high with every last sincere, unrelenting tail-wag of my enfeebled sperm might just luckily strike ovum” [liberal paraphrasing employed].
What inadvertent membrane of Ms. Williams’ that Mr. Nighy hit I dunno, but she sacrificed an otherwise impeccable vivisection for some Bill Nighy love and that gives me Christmassy hope. “Love Actually” aspired only to the same hope as Bill—to be a single Christmas’s hit, which it worked its frenetic ass off trying to do.
So nine years later Ms. Williams hates it because it
“makes the case so convincingly for how miserable the lives of women truly are, and how all fired up awesome it is to be a man.”
Yikes. Through my testosterone-distorted lens, it seemed the men haplessly guessing what women needed and giving relentless chase to it were less than awesome. In fact, they were shout-at-the-screen idiots in a dozen places. A clearly well-proportioned woman was mischaracterized as chubby and flaxen-haired Joanna Page plus Laura Linney showed boob which caused further idiotic hyperventilating but that was me. Maggie Thatcher was called a minx which crossed some kind of line best unexamined and although Claudia Schiffer wasn’t playing herself but her look-alike, her mere existence whether comic device or actual personage is apparently an affront to Mary Elizabeth.
Probably most perplexing was Ms. Williams’ withering assessment of Emma Thompson’s character. In an ADHD movie singularly devoted to comic sex oversell and conspicuously devoid of patience, Emma, bless her exceptional heart, boldly apprehends a younger sexual rival with a patiently aligned, perfectly placed arrow, fetching her husband Alan Rickman back from the edge of infidelity. I didn’t hear the line Ms. Williams evidences as her “heartbreak,” I only saw a strong mate and mother keeping her family and marriage together decisively, then showing up in the next scene with a smart, sexy new hairdo.
Spermatozoically hyperbolic films are so legion these days, Ms. Williams should’ve gone after one of them instead of a trifling old Santa-scale fantasy with priapic realpolitik, cockney putz wish fulfillment and kiss-her-you-idiot contrivances. “It’s a Wonderful Life” is safe for another 70 years.