Love, love, love. Given how movies are pretty indiscriminating when it comes to strewing that word around, there's a positive recklessness in how "Love Actually" takes huge fistfuls of this love stuff and scatters it all over the screen like, like . . . chicken feed? The characters in the film are so full of sighs, so enraptured and so moony, that one fears for the state of their hearts. They must have had a cardiologist ready on the set, standing by with a stretcher team.
You can tell British writer/director Richard Curtis (who penned "Four Weddings and a Funeral" and "Bridget Jones' Diary") is an extremely nice person, maybe almost too nice to be a film director. Not only does he insist on assaulting our senses with various renditions of or references to the L-word, he makes sure that his characters (and there are an awful lot of them) end up happy or hitched, or both -- from the 10-year-old London schoolboy to the fortysomething prime minister, from the aging rock star to the middle-aged wife.
A total of eight couples "find happiness," and other people on the sidelines get their share of coziness, all in the frantic few weeks before Christmas when the inner mantra of "If I don't find someone now I'll be alone for the holidays and maybe the rest of my life" reaches fever pitch. But no one need worry because Curtis is the veritable ambassador of love. By the end credits, everyone is smiling and exchanging glad hugs or passionate kisses. Not the film to see if you're currently spending evenings at home playing solitaire.
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