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There's a smashing British boy in “Love Actually” and it's not Hugh Grant. It's Thomas Sangster, a precocious and beautiful middle schooler who speaks about his crush on a classmate with all the gravity and passion of Heathcliff in “Wuthering Heights.” How to gain her attention becomes a much-needed bond between him and his widower stepfather (Liam Neeson).
Neeson and Sangster are just two of the outrageously attractive and talented cast who tie a glittering Christmas bow around writer-director Richard Curtis' 10 little love stories. Or rather, stories about love. Love found and love failed, love unrequited and puppy love, love threatened and love triumphant. Even love in Wisconsin.
Curtis sets his film five weeks before Christmas in a London so besotted with yuletide that you half expect Ebenezer Scrooge and Tiny Tim to come strolling around a corner, holding hands. The movie begins in a recording studio, where a washed-up rock star (Bill Nighy) is ruefully transforming one of his classics into a ghastly Christmas song, in hopes of a comeback. It then darts from newlyweds Keira Knightley and Chiwetel Ejiofor at their rocking wedding; to a mother (Emma Thompson) gamely fashioning her daughter's lobster costume for the school's Nativity pageant; to the arrival of the new prime minister (Grant) at No. 10 Downing St., where he immediately falls for one of his secretaries (Martine McCutcheon). “Terribly inconvenient,” he stiff-upper-lips to himself.
And there's more. Thompson's husband, Alan Rickman, is an urbane, dryly humorous boss who might risk a good marriage for a bad-girl employee who all but slithers up his leg. Another of his workers, Laura Linney, has a chance to fulfill a longtime crush on an office colleague but has selflessly — perhaps too selflessly— devoted herself to her brother, who lives in an asylum.
Some stories are better than others. We could watch the burgeoning romance between Colin Firth's language-challenged Englishman and his Portuguese-speaking maid for hours. But we see far too much of a couple of pseudo-copulating porn-star stand-ins who “ironically” become interested in each other for real, or the randy young Brit who thinks his love (read, sex) life will change if he goes to America.
Most of “Love Actually” is as bright and cheery as a string of Christmas lights. But Curtis also reminds us that not everyone gets a merry Christmas. A single present plucked from under the tree changes a life forever. A wedding video that shows only close-ups of the bride's face reveals a hopeless passion.
This is the first directorial outing for Curtis, who's written such hits as“Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Notting Hill” and “Bridget Jones's Diary.” But he already knows the first rule of directing: As John Huston so famously said, 99 percent of it is casting. And Curtis has hired only the best.
Grant, who does this kind of crisp comedy with a romantic subtext so very well, stands out. By contrast, Neeson generously cedes most of his scenes to his young and extremely talented co-star. Rickman and Thompson bring their stage-honed savvy to the enterprise, while Firth reminds us why Bridget Jones fell for him. Linney gives a heartbreaking portrayal of a woman who, by doing the decent thing, may have doomed herself to a marginal life. There's also a terrific, surprising cameo by Billy Bob Thornton.
However, Nighy pretty much steals the movie, giving his rock dinosaur a strange dignity as well as a hilarious propensity for telling the truth, no matter how rude it may be. During a TV appearance, after begging the audience to buy his record even though it's “total crap,” he turns to the camera and tells the kids watching, “Don't buy drugs,” then adds, “Become a pop star and then they'll give them to you for free.”
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution: By ELEANOR RINGEL GILLESPIE
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