Are we still smitten with the contentious Christmas classic Love Actually at 20?
With his upbeat new song, “Christmas Is All Around,” Bill Nighy portrays an aging rock musician hoping to make a comeback.
He realizes how terrible the song is as Bill Nighy’s character, washed-up rock star Billy Mack, finally gets the lyrics down to the holiday rendition of Love is All Around (cleverly renamed Christmas is All Around). His manager concurs that it is garbage—”solid-gold” garbage—and smiles.
The stage is now set for Love Actually, a two-hour extravaganza of unlikely, dubious, and downright ridiculous love scenes, supported by an ensemble of Hollywood stars.
Even if the world has moved on from dial-up internet, Apple’s iPod, and low-rise jeans, Richard Curtis’s 2003 holiday drama is still a beloved, if contentious, Christmas classic twenty years later.
Every year, critics, spectators, and even some of the cast members of the film criticize the interwoven romantic narratives of middle-class folks declaring their love throughout the Christmas season, pointing out the unrealistic portrayals of love, dubious character choices, and outmoded gags.
Few are more critical than Curtis himself, who appears to add a new regret to his list every Christmas. The prime minister (Hugh Grant) is discovered kissing Natalie behind the curtain of a primary school nativity play.
The film’s writer and director acknowledged during a cast reunion last year that the picture was “bound in some moments to feel out of date” and that “the lack of diversity makes me feel uncomfortable and a bit stupid”.
That may have been the inspiration behind the opening montage of hugging people at an airport in his holiday variety show Christmas Actually, which included Hugh Grant telling us that love is exchanged not just at Christmas but also at Diwali, Eid, and Hanukkah.
In addition, Curtis said he had “let himself down” by removing an LGBT plot point from the final cut and referred to himself as “unobservant” for putting in fat-shaming gags that “aren’t any longer funny”.
