Love Actually
In its lighthearted fashion, ''Love Actually'' asks us to accept a few radical notions. Among them are that all women in Wisconsin are lollapaloozas who look like Denise Richards, that Liam Neeson might find it difficult to get a date, and that Hugh Grant could in any possible universe serve as prime minister of England.
Buy into these and you'll buy into the film's charming, if terribly overstuffed, vision of romantic London gridlock. ''Love Actually'' gives us 16 major characters in eight tangentially related entanglements of the heart, which is about seven more than any first-time director should take on.
Since that director is Richard Curtis, who wrote ''Four Weddings and a Funeral'' and ''Notting Hill'' (as well as chipping in on the screenplay for ''Bridget Jones's Diary''), his confidence can be forgiven. The man knows from cheeky British ardor, and there's the sense that he has put into ''Love'' all the bits he couldn't fit into his earlier scripts. He also knows the value of plowing familiar ground: There's both a wedding and a funeral here, and more than one character suffers the squidgy comic embarrassment of having to proclaim his love in front of a roomful of strangers. Damned if it doesn't work all over again.
That said, Curtis simply tries to keep too many balls in the air, and several of them end up under the couch. The laundry list of subplots includes: the prime minister (Grant) coping with his infatuation with a pert staffer (Martine McCutcheon); a businessman (Alan Rickman) married to the PM's sister (Emma Thompson) but tempted by his sexpot secretary (Heike Makatsch); a widower (Neeson) trying to help his young son (Thomas Sangster) through his first crush; a divorced writer (Colin Firth) mooning over his Portuguese housekeeper (Lucia Moniz); an art gallery owner (Andrew Lincoln) racked by the marriage of his best friend (Chiwetel Ejiofor, of ''Dirty Pretty Things'') to a young lovely (Keira Knightley, of ''Pirates of the Caribbean''); two porn-film extras (Martin Freeman and Joanna Page) who turn sweetly shy whenever their clothes are on; and one wastrel of a washed-up rock star (the hilarious Bill Nighy), who reserves his affections for his bulldog of a manager (Gregor Fisher).
If you had trouble making it through that paragraph, rest assured the movie has similar problems. The porn extras disappear for long swaths, and the story line about a hapless young Londoner (Kris Marshall) who hopes to make it with an American girl just gets sillier and sillier. Curtis should also steer clear of politics: The romance between the prime minister and the tea lady never feels less than uncomfortable -- not least because Curtis has intentionally cast an actress who resembles Monica Lewinsky -- and when Billy Bob Thornton shows up as the US president and tries to cop a feel for himself, the ick factor becomes undeniable.
Get Grant on his own, however, shaking a tail feather to the Pointer Sisters' ''Jump,'' and the movie shamelessly perks right up. Other segments play out with the right balance of humor and melancholy: As a tightly wound office worker with a crush on the dashing fellow in the next cubicle, Laura Linney expertly mixes repression and horniness, and the revelation of why she may always remain single is a heartbreaker.
So, too, is the performance of Thompson, who has been off raising a daughter for the last four years and who therefore hasn't graced the screen nearly as much as one of our finest actresses should. Confronting the possibility of her husband's infidelity on a snowy Christmas morning, Thompson squeezes disbelief, anger, and deep, deep sorrow into the space of a few seconds -- and then rejoins her family with her usual rollicking intelligence.
Toss in Rowan Atkinson as a supercilious department store clerk and some linguistically challenged and very funny romantic comedy between Firth (who speaks only English) and Moniz (who speaks only Portuguese), and ''Love Actually'' will delight moviegoers who think that more really is more. Cynics who prefer their twee without sugar are advised to look elsewhere.
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