Why Do I Own This?

I have a very large movie and television collection. Across DVDs, Blu-Ray, and 4k discs I have close to four thousand titles sitting on my shelves. It’s a bit ridiculous, I won’t deny, and I honestly can’t say I’ve even watched half of the discs there. Over time I got in the habit of hitting stores not just for new discs but also resale shops as well, grabbing up anything that looked interesting, or seemed culturally relevant, or was cheap and dumb and I figured, “why not.” It’s like my collection has a certain gravitational pull and, at this point, I’m surprised by half the stuff that’s ended up in there.

And yet, even with all of that in mind, I still have no clue how Love Actually ended up in my collection. I want to blame my ex-wife, as I think she liked the film and may have bought it at one point. Except I clearly remember her taking her single shelf of “chick flicks” – which included the likes of The American President, 10 Things I Hate About You, all of Gilmore Girls, and Love Actually – when she left. And yet, somehow this film is there, on my shelf, once more taking up space. Somewhere between then and now I either got another copy or she left hers behind to permanently taint my collection. I don’t want to assign malice and yet… there it is.

I hate this movie. Love Actually is such an awful, treacly, terrible film. It has absolutely no focus, waffling and meandering through a dozen different stories, most of which promise happy endings for our love-struck characters, except if you use even half a brain cell you’d realize none of these stories will end happily. It’s a Christmas film for people, I have to think, who really hate Christmas but still want to put on something vaguely “festive” for the season. It’s a film that, far as I’m concerned, has no redeeming qualities… and for some reason it’s in my collection. I am completely baffled. But because of that, we’re stuck discussing it.

The film is vaguely set during Christmas time, with a “diverse” set of mostly white British actors going through a handful of different stories. None of them are very long, or very detailed, so we’ll quickly cover them in bullet point form:

• Aging rock star Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) sells out and releases a Christmas-themed cover of a "Love Is All Around" by the Troggs and swears, on-air, that if it somehow becomes a hit he’ll perform the track live in the nude.
• Juliet (Keira Knightley) and Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) get married, but Juliet can’t seem to get along with Peter’s best friend, Mark (Andrew Lincoln). This is because Mark is actually in love with Juliet and can’t tell her… right up until she finds out.
• Writer Jamie (Colin Firth) discovers that his girlfriend is cheating on him, so he goes off to a lodge in the middle of nowhere to write. While there he develops feelings for the housemaid, Aurélia (Lúcia Moniz), but she can’t speak a word of English (and he can’t speak her language either).
• Harry (Alan Rickman) is the managing director for a design firm, and he’s married to Karen (Emma Thompson). But when his young employee, Mia (Heike Makatsch), throws herself at him, he’s willing to destroy his marriage for a taste of the hot, new thing.
• Karen’s brother, David (Hugh Grant), is the newly elected Prime Minister, and he wants to do a good job. But then he falls for a cute girl working at 10 Downing Street, Martine McCutcheon. He has to decide if the scandal is worth love.
• Daniel (Liam Neeson) is a widower raising his dead wife’s kid, Sam (Thomas Brodie-Sangster). But when Sam falls for a girl at school, Joanna (Olivia Olson), Daniel has to do what he can to help his kid get the girl.

There’s actually a number of other plotlines, like a woman with unrequited love for a co-worker, a British guy who goes over to the U.S. to bang hot girls, and a couple of porn stars that fall in love while filming, and most of these plotlines never actually connect to each other. For the most part these are all characters completely unrelated to each other, outside of David being Karen’s brother, with the only connective tissue being Christmas as the theme and, occasionally, the awful cover of “Christmas is All Around” getting played in the background. This is a series of vignettes that all happen to take place in the same season, intercut with each other for the sake of fleshing out a “movie”, but I’d struggle to give it that label officially.

The throughline for this film is that “love is, actually, all around” – a terrible line meant to evoke the title and make you feel something, I’m sure (something other than disgust at the awful writing) – but the film fails to sell that concept in any meaningful way. Half the stories don’t actually end in love, such as Harry and Karen never resolving him cheating on her, or the unrequited lovers Sarah (Laura Linney) and Karl (Rodrigo Santoro) never finding true love together due to outside problems. Are some of these stories more realistic because they’re messy? Yes, but then they don’t tie well into the other stories that try to have happy endings despite how terrible their stories actually are.

Let’s take Juliet and Mark for a moment. In the story, Juliet finds out Mark is in love with her. This leads, down the road, to him showing up outside her house, pretending to be carolers so he can confess his feelings to her while Peter is none the wiser. In the end this creepy dude who has been stalking this woman, who it should be noted just got married and is very happy, gets to unburden his feelings on her and, as we watch, she’s happy and even gives him a kiss. He tells us (because the film has no filter), “that’s enough,” but realistically she’s only fueled his desire and this story will only end in restraining orders, long run.

Or take the story of writer Jamie and his foreign love, Aurélia. He travels to her home country, Portugal, to confess his love in front of her whole family, speaking very broken Portuguese. She then confesses back to him in very broken English. It’s a sweet moment ruined only by the facts that: one, they live in two different countries; two, they barely know each other with only surface level investment in what the other person is like; and three, they can still only talk to each other in the most basic of terms. This romance is doomed to fail.

And that says nothing of the jokey plotlines that are thrown into the film for no reason and don’t make sense in context. Colin (Kris Marshall) goes to America to find hot girls who don’t know he’s a dickhead and who can easily be wooed by his British accent. It works, but what does that really say about him, or them. More to the point, what does this actually say about love? He’s just there to have easy sex for a couple of weeks before heading home. That’s not love, and it doesn’t make sense in the context of this film.

Of course the greatest sin this film commits is unleashing "All I Want for Christmas Is You" on audiences again. Mariah Carrey already polluted the season with this song and we didn’t need yet another version of it out there, making all of us irrationally angry at this shitty song. The climax of the film is capped by this song, with a few different plotlines seemingly coming together (for no reason, mind you) and a school concert, and this song shows up, ruining the vibe of an already terrible movie. It’s just awful.

Despite my hate for the film, though, this thing was a smash success. On a budget of $45 Mil it made $250.6 Mil at the Box Office, and then made gangbusters on home video after, as so many people were duped into picking it, considering it a Christmas classic. Hell, I have members in my own family that love this movie and watch it every year and I can’t understand why. On all fronts this movie is awful… and yet it persists. It spawned a whole genre of similar films (a bunch of random people all having random stories, usually about love, around the same time of year) and even got a short charity sequel, Red Nose Day Actually, that continued a bunch of stories.

I hate this film. I hated it the first time I saw it, way back in 2003, and I’ve hated it every time I’ve somehow stumbled on it again in the years since. It’s a terrible movie and I have absolutely no idea how it ended up in my collection. I’d get rid of it if that didn’t, somehow, cut me to my core (I dislike getting rid of any film once it’s on a shelf in the collection). So there it sits, getting my anger unleashed on it every time I see it because, my god, this film sucks.