How Love Actually Ruined Christmas E-Book

Gary Raymond

• Herausgeber: Parthian Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 186

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

RARELY HAS THE POWER OF CINEMA BEEN FELT BY SO MANY, IN SUCH OPPOSING WAYS… 'Love Actually dulls the critical senses, making those susceptible to its hallucinogenic powers think they've seen a funny, warm-hearted, romantic film about the many complex manifestations of love. Colourful Narcotics. A perfect description of a bafflingly popular film.' By any reasonable measurement, Love Actually is a bad movie. There are plenty of bad movies out there, but what gets under Gary Raymond's skin here is that it seems to have tricked so many people into thinking it's a good movie. In this hilarious, scene-by-scene analysis of the Christmas monolith that is Love Actually, Gary Raymond takes us through a suffocating quagmire of badly drawn characters, nonsensical plotlines, and open bigotry, to a climax of ill-conceived schmaltz. How Love Actually Ruined Christmas (or Colourful Narcotics) is the definitive case against a terrible movie.

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© Gary Raymond 2020

First published 2020

All Rights Reserved

ISBN 978-1-913640-21-7

eISBN 978-1-913640-22-4

Edited by David Cottis

Cover design by Syncopated Pandemonium

Typeset by Syncopated Pandemonium

Printed and bound by 4edge Ltd

The publisher acknowledges the financial support of theWelsh Books Council.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A cataloguing record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise be circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

A Scene-by-Scene Response to Love Actually

5 Weeks to Christmas

4 Weeks to Christmas

3 Weeks to Christmas

2 Weeks to Christmas

1 Week to Christmas

Christmas Eve

1 Month Later (Epilogue)

Afterword

Acknowledgements

About the authors

Dedicated

to all those

who have had the shit kicked out of them by

Love Actually

Foreword

By Lisa Smithstead

I remember quite clearly the first time I saw Love Actually, because some trauma is hard to repress. I was an undergraduate film student at the time. As such, I was possessed of obnoxiously strong opinions about Good Film and was perhaps not the ideal target audience. As the lights went down at the university cinema, I distinctly recall a growing feeling of realisation that everyone else around me was having a very different experience. When the credits finally rolled and I turned to see friends with happy tears in their eyes declaring it to be “so lovely”, I wondered if I’d somehow drifted into a parallel universe. Had everyone else been watching a different movie?

Several drinks and perplexing exchanges later (“…but it’s just so sad”, “…but it’s just so charming”, “…but wow, what a cast!”), I was willing to concede that perhaps there was in fact something wrong with me.

Thanks to the existence of this book, twenty-year old me finally feels validated.

If Christmas is – according to Worst Best Friend Ever Andrew Lincoln – a time when we “tell the truth”, How Love Actually Ruined Christmas follows through on this premise with aplomb. Gary Raymond’s analysis is the anti-love letter to all things Richard Curtis: a scene-by-scene take down of every paper-thin plot point, every excruciating piece of dialogue and every half-arsed characterisation.

Drawing on his considerable expertise as a critic, author and film fanatic, Raymond pulls apart what’s actually wrong with Love Actually – from plot holes to production design and the pernicious ideology underpinning much of its lazy narrative. Raymond offers new insight into the fundamentals that the film gets wrong (what the hell is going on with the timelines in each character segment? Why exactly is it funny for everyone to loudly proclaim that Martine McCutcheon’s character is, like, really fat – ha ha ha?). He also presents a fresh analysis of those scenes we think we know inside out (Alan Rickman’s character, for example, might not be quite as much of a bastard as we first thought…).

When I was asked to write this foreword, I was apprehensive. Largely because it involved having to rewatch the movie. I’ve resisted doing so for years. Instead, I’ve taken miserly joy as a film studies lecturer in handing out copies of Lindy West’s wonderful Jezebel article “I Rewatched Love Actually and Am Here to Ruin It for You” to crestfallen undergraduates in the final week of winter term.

As a feminist film historian and as a human woman, Love Actually has always bothered me. Because it’s a movie in which – as many commentators have since pointed out – women are essentially voiceless. They lack any genuine agency, set up as the prizes and possessions of a network of deeply unlikeable male characters. The film follows this premise to its ultimate end by positing its most “romantic”storyline as the one in which the object of male affection is rendered wholly mute by a language barrier. Grotesquely sexist behaviour is never called out by any of the female characters, who instead cue the audience to laugh at each joke made at their expense. Add to that its overwhelming whiteness and wealth and there’s a not a great deal left to like, even if Hugh Grant does do a silly dance.

When I finally settled down to rewatch it with my newborn son (apologising as I did so for inflicting this experience upon him), my initial reaction was horror at the realisation this film is over two hours long. This horror then mutated in interesting ways as the layers of Problematic that I’d never fully clocked the first-time round snowballed with the introduction of each new character. What stands out more than anything peering back into the murky waters of the early 2000s is its relentless misogyny. This turns out to be inseparable from its fatphobia, occasional casual transphobia, and cringe-inducing notion that to be British is to use “piss”, “shit” and “fuck” to punctuate one’s sentences – and my gosh isn’t that all just charming.

I’m also guilty, though, of resisting a total dismissal of the film’s merits by appealing to that one redeeming feature. That familiar plea of “I accept it’s not a good film, but I do love the bit when…” My father-in-law, on a behind-the-scenes visit to Number 10 a few years ago, gleefully did that dance down those stairs. That’s a lot of people’s “moment”. For others it’s the flash cards. Other still have a soft spot for the precocious kid, who Raymond rightly pegs as a potential future incel. My own personal push back is “…but Emma Thompson”. You know, just generally: Emma Thompson. It can’t be that bad if it has Emma Thompson in it, even if it amounts to about ten minutes’ total screen time. This take has been swiftly remedied, however, by reading Raymond’s clear explanation here of why her character is possibly the original Karen in a film that clearly hates women.

The more I watched it, the more my love–hate obsessions with it grew, and the more this book seemed a necessary intervention to tackle that broad consensus that Love Actually is not just good, but a “classic” of the romcom genre. How Love Actually Ruined Christmas isn’t simply an exercise in trashing something everyone loves, however. It’s far too easy to take the contrary stance, to be That Guy for the sake of it. For all its wit, Raymond’s take down is at heart a sincere intervention, highlighting the insidious aspects of the film. His analysis pinpoints a nastiness inherent within the bulk of its characterisations, and a humour fuelled by classist and sexist stereotypes that register significantly differently with hindsight.

If interrogating all that doesn’t sound entirely appealing, fear not. Raymond’s scene-by-scene deconstruction pulls apart the worst the film has to offer with considerable humour, always witty in its clapbacks to each offensive notion the film presents as humorously endearing. If you are equally perplexed by the popularity of this film – if you just can’t understand how this random assemblage of unappealing, barely fleshed out characters even constitutes a movie – then this book is for you. If, on the other hand, you have a soft spot for it, at the very least enjoy a fresh take on things. See if we can’t persuade you that, actually, as Raymond suggests, “cynicism has its uses”.

Introduction

I remember reading somewhere once that the great thing about Christmas is that it’s obligatory. And I suppose the best way to enjoy it is to go all in. As a child, I loved Christmas. Ranking high in the family stories trotted out every year is the one about how I used to tremble with excitement on Christmas morning as I waited to open my presents (the telling has become something of a family tradition in and of itself). A kid subsumed by the capitalist blob?1 Sure. But back then, the deal was less with the devil, and more with the Argos catalogue.2 Christmas Eve was time spent in the organised chaos of the extended family, involving an extensive triangle sandwich and cold meat buffet and the exchanging of the B-grade gifts between siblings, nephews, nieces, and maybe the occasional cousin. Our neighbour would dress as Father Christmas and bring his whiskey-rouged cheeks door to door along the terraces, his nicotine-stained fingers grasping a sack of plastic pickup trucks and long-legged dolls. The A-grade prezzies is what made me tremble the next morning – the stuff from the real Santa, i.e. my parents. I wouldn’t sleep that night, of course, as the trembles set in. The longest nights of my life. There were the toys, the gluttonous excess of foods, abundance of hugs, family, the movies circled off in the Radio Times, everyone gathering round to watch The Snowman or The Empire Strikes Back or Raiders of the Lost Ark on one of the four channels. The concerted efforts to squeeze every drop of worth out of every second of the day.3 Next year was just so far away, after all. As I grew older, I became saddened that Christmas meant less. In my twenties, there was even a brief period where I affected the cynicism of the Grinch. Perhaps, for a while, I saw that as a badge of adulthood, rolling my eyes whenever anyone looked suspiciously yule-y in the pub. I was part of a club. The Bollocks to Christmas Club. We were above it all. Cynics of the most noble stripe. But that only lasted a few years, and I came back to my rightful place as a Lover of Christmas. I crossed the floor and then crossed back again. If Christmas is obligatory, then fighting against its obligations proved a miserable bit of theatre.

Of course, it’s not what it was. But nothing ever is. I grew up in the eighties, a decade that had enough problems of its own, but one that seemed to do Christmas just the way I liked it. Toys were precious, and you knew Mum and Dad had to work hard and save hard to buy them, but they weren’t unobtainable, they weren’t driving anybody into debt, and they weren’t encouraging mass brawls in the supermarkets. Christmas was special because it didn’t start in October but waited respectfully until the schools broke up before the sound of carols or Phil Spector echoed in shops or the sparkle of street decorations lined the main drag through town. And the bedrock of that Christmas, the joy that we all marched to, was the folklore brought to us by Hollywood and Dickens. Stove pipe hats had been replaced by bobble hats, but apart from that nothing had changed since the chocolate tin visions of skating on frozen ponds. Bobble hats and Transformers.4 Yes, Transformers made a difference too. All of this may be romanticised nonsense, twisted and contorted into the saccharine shapes my grown-up sensitivity needs in order to look back and cherish, but none of that matters, because Christmas is about putting a soft focus on the past and creating a fireplace in front of which we can curl up and reminisce. Your memories of childhood Christmas don’t need to be historically accurate. They just serve to inform the tapestry of the good things about growing up.

It is true that Christmas changed when consumerism changed. I’m sure there was a lot of shit around when I was a kid, but I was insulated from it by a blanket woven from the sacred spools of ignorance, naivety, and freedom from the rulebook of what constituted shit and what constituted valuable artefacts. That’s why I loved the VHS copy of Howard the Duck my dad regularly rented for me at my request from the local video shop as much as I loved the Holst’sPlanet Suite LP that my grandfather used to play to me. So, I have no inclination to look down on the fan of shit. I’m a fan of shit myself. I like nothing more than to sit down with a bag of chewy sweets and watch an eighties slasher movie. In recent years, I have become fascinated with the right-wing Christmas movie phenomenon as best exemplified by Hallmark, branching out from greeting cards to home cinema to fill our Christmases with actors from forgotten nineties television programmes saving their hometown of WASPville, Connecticut, in time for the Christmas Ball. I like television cooking competitions, but not the British ones that are characterised by the gumption of the competitors and the wit of the presenters; no, I like the Australian shows, the ones that come out of the screen at you as if you are being beaten to death by a thousand ashcan lids during Mardi Gras. What I’m saying is, I’m no snob. I believe in the visceral manipulative power of the screen, what Ingmar Bergman once said was the ability for film to go “directly to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of the soul”.5 And since his day, the most popular (as in the stuff watched by the broadest audience figures) filmmakers more and more are bypassing script-craft and character depth for sledgehammer signposting. Why infer what a character is feeling, when you can douse the whole scene with a petrochemical soundtrack? This kind of filmmaking can bring you joy without any depth of entanglement. It can make you weep for people whose names, in the midst of the blubbing, you would not be able to recall if a gun was put to your head. This shit washes over you, and it may not smell of roses, but it doesn’t necessarily leave you with some terrible disease.6 But low-demand trash must have some rules, some structure, must be made by people who know exactly what it is they are serving up.7 You enter into a contract with these artists, one that promises thrills and titillation, in return for which we viewers will forgive, and even indulge, a great deal. What is unacceptable is a work that is boring, or worse; a work that thinks it’s something that it isn’t.

*

I guess if there was a tribe to which I was never going to admit to belonging as a youngster it was the Guild of Appreciators of Romantic Comedies.8 And not simply the screwball comedies of Golden Era Hollywood, such as My Man Godfrey (1936) or The Philadelphia Story (1940), which brought a certain cachet by the time I was mid-teens because “old movies” had a literary cool about them. I could also get away with banging on about Roman Holiday (1953) and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) for hours on end because Audrey Hepburn was an icon. But you wouldn’t really get away with calling these films “romantic comedies”, even though that’s what they are. The romcom, to me and my friends in the nineties, was defined by films like When Harry Met Sally (1989), which we admired because Billy Crystal was a smartass just like we wanted to be, eating fries and offering quips on life and writing about sport for a living. It wasn’t because it was a beautifully structured and funny romantic story. Harry was a child; that’s why we responded to that film. What you definitely couldn’t get away with was losing yourself in Sleepless in Seattle (1993) or You’ve Got Mail (1999), and you wouldn’t find any of us sitting around at parties picking apart Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), even though we’d all seen these films, and we’d all liked9 them. Nowadays, of course, we’re all grown-ups, and we can all have grown-up conversations about how great these movies are, and we can even stay up past our bedtime because some deep-dive channel hopping has brought us face to face with Roxanne (1987) or Working Girl (1988). The politics of these films are often questionable, and sometimes the character motivation calls for some forgiveness too. That’s to the credit of the writers and directors, like Kevin Wade and Mike Nichols who get us to side with Melanie Griffiths over Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl, when a slight shift in perspective would probably upend that boat trip without much fuss.10 We let a lot slide, because we’re in this for something else, for that shower, not of shit, really, but of something elating, something that tells us love is a power stronger than cynicism. And cynicism, as a modern concept driven by the snakes of capitalism,11 the one that makes everything feel cheap and nasty, is where creativity, and sentimental manifestations of it, meets Christmas. By which I mean the modern version of Christmas, the Michael Bay version, not the eighties Transformers version.

Hallmark movies are one thing, but the film towards which we are slowly gliding, and the subject of this book, is something else. With Hallmark movies, nobody is professing to have taken these Republican Party seasonal flat-pack turds to heart. Those of us drawn to them are drawn to them because of both an intellectual fascination with awfulness, but also an unashamed welcoming of trash into our lives. The politics of movies such as Christmas on Honeysuckle Lane (2018) and The Mistletoe Promise (2016) are clear and unambiguous: Jesus was a white man who undoubtedly voted for Ronald Reagan. But they are predominantly conservative, family values movies, and the rather more unpalatable connotations of American centre-right politics are on the periphery if not entirely absent altogether. Nobody is encouraging children to take drugs, very rarely are we asked to side with a sexual predator, and the scripts are notably scarce of misogynistic jokes, or transphobic jokes, or homophobic jokes, or ableist jokes, or indeed any jokes that sneer and snark. I understand why people like Hallmark movies at Christmas. That’s why I haven’t written a book about them. There is no allure of the quest in writing that book. What I have become interested in, and something I have bored a litany of friends with over the years, is why, oh why could anybody possibly like Love Actually?

*

The Love for Love Actually is real. It is out there and it’s a powerful thing. A non-scientific survey12 conducted during the writing of this book brought an interesting array of responses to the question: What do you think of Love Actually? There was no indifference. One friend said they hated the trailer so much they didn’t need to see the movie and have their rage codified in the compartments of scenes that make up the movie. Of those who had seen it, I hesitate to say the responses were split between those who analysed the film, and despised it, and those who simply expressed an emotional reaction to it. Haters cited overwhelmingly the misogyny of the film. They also broke down the narrative strands that make no sense, the characters they wanted to set fire to, the unearned schmaltz,13 the class politics, the lazy and offensive comedy, the paper-thin characterisation, the offensive representation of mental illness, of sexual politics, and of women in general. Indeed, more than a few of the respondents to my question could have written their own version of this book. Lovers of Love Actually, however, tended to be more direct, less circumspect. They just love love love it. It was referred to as a “favourite Christmas movie ever”, “love that film”, “don’t spoil it for me”, and it was variously described as “hilarious” “heart-warming” and, wait for it, “the perfect Christmas film”. I like to think that none of my friends are particularly problematic in their views and politics. I wouldn’t like to assume anything, but my knowledge of these friends suggests to me that if they knew anybody in person who behaved the way most of the characters behave in Love Actually, they would definitely be pulled up on it. Yet, within the frame of that screen, on this occasion, and during the decades of social progress we have made since the film hit cinemas in 2003, critical faculties appear to have been put on hold. Why is that? What is the power of Love Actually to do this to people I love? I hope I have explained that I understand, and, on the whole, am an advocate for, the existence and enjoyment of shit. As one MGM scriptwriter was fond of saying in the 1940s, “shit has its own integrity”.14 But I never saw any integrity in Love Actually. What did I miss? I have only ever seen a tone-deaf, offensive, badly made movie with an execrable script and dire performances, all cast to a backdrop of ugly cynicism and a dubious moral compass. But this has never been enough to turn some people away. Indeed, not just turn them away. Love Actually boasted a £250 million box office (off the back of £40m budget). People love love love Love Actually. But to love it, one must suspend all critical faculties, surely? Toss to the wind any sensitivities about entire groups of society that society would do better to be sensitive about? Or have I misunderstood something about it? Have I been overthinking it? Or underthinking it? Or thinking about it in the wrong way? Perhaps now, with a pen and notebook in hand, I am better equipped to understand its allure. Now that I have ten years as a critic under my belt, and undoubtedly a more compassionate approach to other people’s baffling admirations than I admittedly might have had when the film came out and I was twenty-four, I think I can give Love Actually something better than the benefit of the doubt: I’m going to give it my undivided attention.

*

Preparing to write a book like this, where you are ready – nay, hopeful – of having existing views counterbalanced or even upturned – can be a precarious business. Reading up on Love Actually has rarely offered me any hope.

I recently read a typical paragraph that said, “Love Actually oddly has a tendency to be underrated, dismissed as too cutesy or misogynistic… And all of that, in fairness, is true. But it’s also a real classic of the form – masterfully structured, endlessly watchable.”15 This passage was written in 2020, in The Independent, a publication known for much of its hard-copy life as a serious British newspaper where you could go for serious thoughtful journalism.16 The article admits Love Actually is misogynistic, but then dismisses what can only be best described as the concerns of people who point out the misogyny, and goes on to say that Love Actually is “masterfully structured” (it’s not; it’s a mess, and even writer–director Richard Curtis has spoken of the “nightmare” of the editing process). It is referred to as a “classic of the form” (a common defence), yet we are not too sure what “form” here is being referenced. Christmas movie? Romantic comedy? Compare Love Actually like for like, to save confusion, with Richard Curtis’s other high-achieving forays into romcom (as writer and/or director), such as Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), Notting Hill (1999), or Bridget Jones’s Diary