The ghastly Christmas movie factory

Hugh Grant in 'Love Actually', which was released 20 years ago and continues to inspire new Christmas holiday pictures.

This is a highly polarising opinion for romcom nuts. When Richard Curtis’ Love Actually, with a casting coup that included the best of British and American actors (Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson, Colin Firth, Laura Linney, Bill Nighy, Alan Rickman, Keira Knightly, Chiwetel Ejiofor, among others), reviews were either downright love or crushing take-downs. Recently, the cast of the film reunited for an ABC News special to commemorate the film’s 20 years. In 2017, some of the stars reprised their roles in a sequel called Red Nose Day Actually—a short film produced as part of a charity fundraising event in which the characters cap off some of the stories in the original.

Emma Thompson and the late Alan Rickman in 'Love Actually'.

It is understandable why some movie lovers and critics wouldn’t take to the film. It has a running length of 136 minutes, and it has nine love stories—platonic, familial, and also romantic kind—packed in with some semblance of hyper-linkage. It overflows with sentimentality, gleeful and sombre in turns about recreating every has romantic comedy cliché you can possibly think of, and every story has the most predictable outcome. Since the film's release, there have been so many other holiday-themed films that have tried to capitalize on Love Actually, titles like Valentine's Day and New Year's Eve, none of which have become holiday classics in the way that this film did.

The relationships in a nutshell, and the little that happens in Love Actually: The British prime minister (Hugh Grant) and a young member of his household staff (Martine McCutcheon); a crime novelist (Colin Firth) and his Portuguese maid (Lúcia Moniz); a graphic designer (Laura Linney) and the colleague (Rodrigo Santoro) on whom she’s had a long-standing crush and her developmentally-challenged brother; a husband (Alan Rickman) and wife (Emma Thompson) in the middle of marital stagnation; a widower (Liam Neeson) and his lovesick stepson (Thomas Brodie-Sangster); a new bride (Keira Knightley) and her husband’s best friend (Andrew Lincoln); an ageing rocker (Bill Nighy) and his manager (Gregor Fisher); two body doubles (Martin Freeman and Joanna Page) whose job is to perform sex acts on a movie set; and a delusional British Don Juan  (Kris Marshall) and his trysts with American dream girls. There are other subsidiary relationships that serve the primary relationships’ arcs.

The stories unfold in parallel tracks, culminating on Christmas Eve. Curtis uses the climax for an Archie-card sentiment: That there’s no better way to welcome the holidays at the airport, hugging your loved ones as they arrive to be with you. Now, that climax is so low-energy and prosaic. But then, two years after 9/11, having that long climactic sequence at busy Heathrow was a kind of a quiet reaffirmation that love trumps fear.

The Christmas movie is big business. Look at the OTTs at this time. Every other day, a Hollywood Christmas movie drops mostly with actors who you’ve seen in small roles in big titles. Last year, even Brooke Shields joined the bandwagon with Christmas at the Castle for Netflix. Netflix also had two really timely, well-written ones centred around LGBTQ love in the last two years: The Happiest Season (2020) with Kristen Stewart in the lead;  and Single All The Way (2021) with Michael Urie, charming to a fault, in the lead.

This year, a few are already out; here are Netflix’s elevated pitches for some of theirs: Falling for Christmas with Lindsay Lohan in the lead, “After losing her memory in a skiing accident, a spoiled heiress lands in the cozy care of a down-on-his-luck widower and his daughter at Christmastime”; The Noel Diary, “Cleaning out his childhood home at Christmas, a novelist meets a woman searching for her birth mother. Will an old diary unlock their pasts?”; Christmas With You, “Seeking inspiration for a hit holiday song, a pop star grants a young fan’s wish to meet her—and find a shot at true love along the way”. There are several more to come, of course; info on Netflix, then definitely on Hallmark, America’s favourite “lifestyle and romance” TV channel. One title scheduled on Hallmark this year is “Single and Ready to Jingle.”

Overall, the Christmas movie factory has an overwhelming majority of ghastly stories and bad acting. They all rest on the lead character’s return from success, ambition or cynicism to tradition and sentimentality.

What Love Actually did was not dramatically different from a typical holiday film. A cynical cloud lifts from almost every character; and it endorses the declaration of love as the same as happy endings. But the writing had a snap; some dialogues crackle: “Get a grip; people hate sissies. No one's ever going to shag you if you cry all the time.”; "And I realized that, as dire chance and... and... and fateful cockup would have it, here I am, mid-50s, and without knowing it I've gone and spent most of my adult life with a... with a chubby employee. And... and much as it grieves me to say it, it... it might be that the people I love is, in fact... you”; “If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around”; “Who do you have to screw around here to get a cup of tea and a chocolate biscuit?”

The soundtrack that has classics like "All I Want for Christmas Is You," and cherished love songs like "God Only Knows," and also Dido’s “Here With me", Norah Jones’ “Turn Me On”, Eva Cassidy’s “Songbird”, “Jump” by the Pointer Sisters. It is exactly the kind of movie best watched with friends with a cocktail. Emma Thompson sobbing over her husband’s fling with a 20-something co-worker while listening to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” or the British prime minister knocking on the door of a London suburb in search of the secretary he has fallen for—some of these scenes are stuff of romcom grandeur. In India, Love Actually is not available to stream on any OTT. The best we could do to rewatch it is amazon ourselves a DVD and take out the old DVD player for a test.