I watched Love Actually for the first time the other day (a thrift store was selling the DVD for 2 dollars); one of the reasons I bought the DVD was because it seemed to have all the right ingredients: written and directed by Richard Curtis (part-creator of Blackadder and Mr. Bean) and featuring an all-star cast with serious acting and comedy prowess (including, but not limited to, Bill Nighy, Emma Thompson, Alan Rickman, Rowan Atkinson, Keira Knightley, Liam Neeson, Hugh Grant, and Martin Freeman); and yet, I found myself unable to watch the film in one sitting, and later on found out that Love Actually has only a 64% Rotten Tomatoes rating. My first thought after watching the film was "What went wrong? How did a film with such a promising cast fall so short of my expectations?" After a few days' reflection, here is how I think the film went wrong:
- Too many characters and subplots
AKA Syriana syndrome; this is perhaps a bit specific for me, but generally I don't like it when a work tries to follow too many different plot lines, especially when it keeps switching back and forth between them (I stopped reading the first Game of Thrones book about halfway through for this reason). I have seen works that manage to do one of the two, such as Guy Richie's first two films, which only have only 2 or 3 major plot lines (In Lock Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels it's the card game, robbery of the weed growers, and theft of the antique shotguns while in Snatch it's the diamond theft and boxing match), or some films in which each subplot is almost a self-contained short film within a film, such as Night on Earth, Four Rooms, and Mystery Train, or James Michener and Edward Rutherfurd's generation-spanning books, which treat each generation living in the book's setting as a short story within the overall arc of that city or region's history. That said, I did enjoy works like The Stand and It which manage to do both things at the same time successfully, but Love Actually wasn't one of those works. Also, the subplots in Love Actually don't seem to cross over or tie together all that much compared to those other works.
- Slow pacing
The film, especially the first half, seemed too slow-paced, with a pace ranging from "a bit slow" to "interminable". One of the ways Guy Richie's works were able to balance those simultaneous plot lines was by having the plot advance at a frantic pace, but in this film it felt like I was watching it at 2/3rds or even half speed. The pace of the second half does pick up, but it still feels to me like this could have been edited to about 3/4 or even 2/3rds of its current length.
- Rowan Atkinson was severely under-used
Apparently, it was originally planned for Rowan Atkinson's character to show up and cause problems in everybody's storyline, but they cut all but two of his scenes from the film. Not only would keeping him have (probably) made the film much funnier, having him in all the scenes would have contributed to making it feel like all of the subplots were more interconnected than they were. I also find it hard to believe that they in a film this overly long and slow-paced, they cut out most of the scenes featuring the actor with possibly the best comedy potential (that said, even keeping him in might not have been guaranteed comedy gold; while the parts he is in are quite funny, they're nowhere near the scene-stealing performance he gave in Four Weddings and a Funeral as the gaffe-prone clergyman).
- Tonal inconsistency
Some of the sequences were quite risque, others felt like they were from a family film, some felt like they were from a melodrama while others felt like they were from a zany comedy; all in all, the whole was less than the sum of its parts.
That said, this wasn't a terrible movie, or even really all that bad, just a disappointment; given the cast and crew, it should have been an A, but instead ended up being around a C+ if I was grading it (and given that I'm writing this analysis, I suppose that in a way I am grading it). That said, I think a part of why this film fell flat for me was because it was a romantic comedy, a genre I don't really watch all that much in general; the only other romcoms I've seen and liked are either ones that could be considered classics or semi-classics like When Harry Met Sally or Sixteen Candles, or films like My Big Fat Greek Wedding (which was as much a clash-of-cultures/fish-out-of-water comedy as it was a romantic comedy).
