Love Actually
- Jun 11
- 2 min read
Since I recommended the wicked, black comedy Bad Santa as a film to enjoy during this holiday, I thought it only fitting that I atone for that sin by closing out this year with a tribute to a hugely popular and romantic Christmas movie—2003’s Love Actually. Ironically, it was released the same year as Bad Santa.
“It seems to me that love is everywhere.”
I chose to review Love Actually here, not because I think it ranks as one of my favorite films, but because I cannot think of a better film cure for what ails the world in 2023; a bad year in so many ways—from the turmoil and suffering around the world to the hard, personal losses that many of us may have endured. In the face of such darkness, it can be hard to find hope. But as Love Actually makes clear, it’s there, right in front of us. As the voice of one of the characters says at the start of the film, “Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world,” he thinks about the scene at the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport where people are reunited with loved ones—friends, lovers, family. As they embrace, kiss, and cry, he says that people “make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere.” Love Actually is a joyful, funny, heartfelt valentine to that belief. Pretty soon a new version of the Troggs’ classic “Love Is All Around” is playing on the soundtrack and we are off into a labyrinth of romantic comedy storylines that remind us that our hope as a species depends on each of us finding, expressing, cherishing, practicing, and living love.
Are the various plotlines sometimes cloying and too precious? Of course. Look too closely and the film often reveals itself to be engineered more for grand entertainment than for genuine moments of dramatic truth. But the writing and direction of Richard Curtis is so engaging, so funny, so moving that you might have to check your pulse if you don’t feel the rich emotional power of his idea that our greatest gift to ourselves and to each other is love. And the remarkable cast that he assembles here to tell his sprawling story is breathtaking—from Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson and Alan Rickman to Laura Linney, Hugh Grant, Bill Nighy, Colin Firth and many others.
I give Love Actually three-and-a-half out of four stars. It’s a crowd-pleaser, a reminder that in a world where hope sometimes feels like it’s drifting further out of reach, love is still all around. it’s everywhere, ready to nourish and renew—if only we will let it, if only we will live it.
