It was 2012 when I first glimpsed the void and since then, like a humanoid creature garbed in pale white stalking me due to a sex curse, it has followed. Every December it rears its head once more, tilting its head to the winter moon and howling. I always answer its call. I must.
Love Actually is a movie that has confounded me since I first saw it. I’m not alone. Every year when the holidays come around its merits (or lack thereof) are relitigated via think pieces, podcasts, and lengthy arguments on Twitter. It feels safe to say that it is not a very good movie, but that hasn’t stopped it from becoming so firmly integrated into the public’s consciousness or from becoming a staple of the holiday season.
Like Home Alone, another subject put under this column’s microscope, it does not seem like the sort of movie whose status as a Christmas Movie need be questioned. It takes place over the course of the four weeks leading up to Christmas. During those four weeks the holiday season is (mostly) used as a catalyst for romantic gestures, families growing closer, or personal choices that will come to define the lives of these characters for the foreseeable future. The emotional climax of the film takes place during a grade-school Christmas pageant. All of the boxes are ticked. Love Actually has gotta be a Christmas movie, doesn’t it?
I don’t know what Love Actually is anymore. It has, over the course of the near-decade I’ve spent watching it every holiday season, only becomes more and more perplexing to me. I’ve spent years trying to solve it only to annually realize that there is nothing to solve. It is madness incarnate dressed up in a nice Christmas sweater. It’s brain poison and the years it has spent infecting me have left scars that may never heal.
Photo Credit: Peter Mountain / Universal Studios
It is first worth stating that in theory Love Actually is a movie in love with love itself – though this fails to hold true in practice To love the emotion and state of being that is love is to have an understanding of what love is, to have the ability to empathize, to understand its vastness and complexity. Love, Actually has none of this. Rather, it is infatuated with love. It thinks love seems awfully neat and fun and like a great excuse to pull off some Grand Gesture.
In fact, it’s a movie that seems to have been reverse-engineered around the ideas of a few specific grand romantic gestures. Watching the film you can imagine the creative team jotting down some ideas for displays of romanticism – a guy on a porch delivering a message to his secret love via hand-written signs, a young boy sprinting through an airport to say goodbye to the girl he loves, a man traveling to a foreign land with the whole village following him as he storms into a restaurant to ask for his love’s hand in marriage – and proceeded to reverse-engineer some characters and plots that would eventually conclude with these set pieces.
As such, the film only works in the most passive of viewing experiences. You must watch each moment play out and accept it at face value, apply zero further thought or examination to it, and forget about it as soon as it happens. Do this and you will likely enjoy Love Actually as a charming holiday film about the power of love and telling people how you feel about them on Christmas.
Photo Credit: Universal Studios
Time has a way of changing our relationship with art. Maybe in the 365 days that had passed between that first and second viewing I’d grown as a person. Maybe the simple act of reabsorbing the events of the film made the cracks in its foundation all the more evident. All I know for sure is that this time something was different. I began to notice what would soon be recognizable as a fundamental rot at the film’s core.
The people in this movie didn’t act like people, nor characters in a movie. Each seemed to function as raw i’d incarnate, acting on the most asinine impulses and selfish desires. The only two people in the movie who seem to contain good, contain real humanity, are the characters played by Emma Thompson and Laura Linney and both happen to receive the only unhappy endings in the film. They’re punished for their decency because there is no room for decency in the world of Love Actually.
Somehow, the movie proved itself simultaneously fascinating in its depravity and inexplicably rewatchable. Every holiday season I’ve watched it at least once and every time I’ve walked away more and more perplexed by the utter madness hiding beneath its tinsel-adorned surface. With each new viewing I find a new story beat that sticks out as the most baffling and today I couldn’t tell you which is the worst.
Photo Credit: Universal Studios
Is it the Prime Minister of England inciting World War III on national television because President Billy Bob Thornton makes a pass at the secretary he has a crush on? Is it Colin, the irredeemable pervert, traveling to America to get laid and being rewarded for it with an orgy courtesy of five caricatured American girls? Perhaps it’s the sworn enemy of Twitter and professional think piece writers: Sign Guy the character who confesses his love for his best friend’s new wife (who he creeped on from afar with a video camera AT HER WEDDING) through a series of hand-crafted posters on her front porch (sidenote: “On Christmas, you tell the truth” THAT’S NOT A THING, SIGN GUY!! THAT’S NEVER BEEN A THING PEOPLE SAY!).
Christmas Movies are a versatile subgenre but they shouldn’t revolve around the sins of madmen and heathens, especially not if said madmen and heathens are being rewarded for said sins with a lovely airport montage set to a Beach Boys song in the end. It’s a movie about Christmas that gets everything about the holiday and about being a functional human being capable of empathy wrong. The film never even actually depicts Christmas! It wraps up on Christmas Eve and then cuts ahead to a few months later.
Photo Credit: Universal Studios
I don’t know if Love Actually is a Christmas movie anymore. I may never. All I know is that something in me is broken because every December I return to it like an addict to the needle. I know it will hurt me and still I take it in. It doesn’t feel like the holidays until I watch Hugh Grant’s horrible assistant comment on Natalie’s weight or Alan Rickman’s coworker show up to an office holiday party dressed as the devil and try to jump his bones. Never will there come a year when I don’t put it on and try to decipher how this movie happened, what it means, or what it says about me (or the millions of folks like me who do the same come December) that I keep coming back.
More on Geek.com:
- IS IT A CHRISTMAS MOVIE?: ‘Die Hard’
- Three Reasons Why Star Wars Fans Should Check Out ‘Mobile Suit Gundam’
- IS IT A CHRISTMAS MOVIE?: ‘Home Alone’
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