film | Richard Bowker

The DVD has been placed next to the DVD player. I have been informed that the annual event will take place Sunday or Monday evening. I can’t wait to experience yet again what has been called “the apex of cynically vacant faux-motional cash-grab garbage cinema”. (I don’t know what faux-motional means, but it sure doesn’t sound good.)

Last year I had my say about Love Actually, and this year everyone seems to be piling on. The film critic of The Atlantic calls the idea of watching the movie every years as a holiday tradition “utterly insane” and goes on at novella length about how anti-romantic it is. He has good things to say about a couple of the subplots, but then:

As for the rest of the film—which is to say, the bulk of the film—I think it offers up at least three disturbing lessons about love. First, that love is overwhelmingly a product of physical attraction and requires virtually no verbal communication or intellectual/emotional affinity of any kind. Second, that the principal barrier to consummating a relationship is mustering the nerve to say “I love you”—preferably with some grand gesture—and that once you manage that, you’re basically on the fast track to nuptial bliss. And third, that any actual obstacle to romantic fulfillment, however surmountable, is not worth the effort it would require to overcome.

All of which is undoubtedly true, but geez, it’s also true of just about any romantic comedy that comes out of Hollywood. At least in Love Actually some of the romances actually fail.

Which is to say that I’m beginning to feel a bit of sympathy for the movie, even if I’m not exactly looking forward to seeing Liam Neeson’s kid running endlessly through Heathrow to say goodbye to his ten-year-old beloved. There’s always Hugh Grant dancing, and Emma Thompson crying, and Keira Knightley looking pretty, and Bill Nighy being Bill Nighy.

In a recent Boston Globe readers poll, Love Actually came in fifth on the list of favorite Christmas movies, tops among modern films except for the sublime Elf. Is it possible the readers know something the critics don’t?

The Words is a movie about writers and writing. Not a very good one, alas. The basic plot is straightforward: an unsuccessful writer comes across a manuscript in an old briefcase he buys in Paris. The manuscript is brilliant. He passes it off as his own and becomes famous. Then the real author confronts him, and complications ensue.

Except they don’t, really. The complications are actually in the narrative structure. The unsuccessful writer (played by Bradley Cooper, of all people) is just a character in a novel written by a successful novelist (played by Dennis Quaid, of all people), who is narrating the story to a rapt audience. By the end we are made to wonder if the successful novelist is really writing about an episode in his own writing career–did he, too, get his start by stealing someone else’s work? The writers seem to think it’s sufficient to hint at this possibility without resolving the question. I guess they deserve some credit for not going in for cheap melodrama. But the plot is filled with so many holes and absurdities that it doesn’t really matter. I lost interest early on.

Part of the problem is that it’s really difficult to dramatize a writer on screen. Writers, and the writing life, are just too boring. The only interesting portrayal I can recall is in The Wonder Boys. Let me know if I’ve missed any.

But I did find the movie’s central premise poignant. In this post I pondered Oliver Sacks’s self-threat to commit suicide if he didn’t finish a book in ten days, and I felt a twinge of sympathy. Here I pondered a young writer who evidently plagiarized parts of her first novel, and I felt a twinge of sympathy. In the movie, the unsuccessful writer has poured three years of his life into a novel that is supposedly pretty good but completely unsaleable. Now he risks his career, his self-respect and, ultimately, his marriage to achieve what he has always dreamed of–to win the awards, to be on the front page of the Times book review, to be something more than just another unsuccessful writer with a boring job at a publishing house, his nose pressed up against the window as he gazed in at the powerful and the talented and the just plain lucky. And I suppose yet again I felt a twinge of sympathy. If only the movie had made more of that . . .