The Total Agony of Love
The other night we watched a movie that was a Christmas movie made in 2021 called Love Hard. It was about a cool L.A. blogger who gets “catfished” by an Asian kid from Lake Placid. They spend the next few days pretending to be a couple and they fundamentally disagree about the best Christmas movie. It seems this subject, which I covered extensively a few days ago, is getting to be like the Ugly Sweater contest in that it is becoming so corny that its coming back around to being cool. The cool L.A. girl thinks the best Christmas movie is Diehard, which is apparently now the classic controversial go/no-go candidate as a Christmas movie or not. I had it as a controversial second-string choice. As for the nerdy Asian kid, his selection was Love Actually, which sort of made Miss Cool kind of sick to her stomach. It seems Love Actually, a top-five choice of mine (and Kim’s), has become a bit of a joke for being such a sappy lovey doves movie. At one point, the girl, who becomes enamored with the Asian kid, goes to his house and does a funny version of the scene where the best man uses cue cards to tell his best friend’s new wife how he is infatuated with her, but that he is letting that crush go as the honorable thing to do. It was the ultimate dis of the movie.
I am doing my obligatory watching of Love Actually right now as I am writing this. As a writer, I love this movie. It has that Seinfeld-like quality where separate plot lines all merge into one at the end in both predictable and unpredictable ways. It is a cute trick for romantic comedies and the thing about this movie is that it is a triple-threat of being romantic, a comedy AND a Christmas movie. I generally don’t respect formulaic movie-writing…at least not until I see it done extremely well and with a clever enough twist to make you forget that you are being taken down a well-trodden path. The movie’s writer and director is none other than Richard Curtis who has done so many wonderful romantic comedies and cut his teeth helping Rowan Atkinson write all the Mr. Bean movies and TV series. He also wrote that great whacky comedy called Yesterday about a world where the Beatles never existed, but the protagonist knows all their songs and takes them on as his own. Kim and I had the opportunity to see that movie at a SAG premier and meet and hear from Richard Curtis and that locked in his place in the writer’s firmament for me.
The movie does one better than a Seinfeld episode, where Larry David generally merged three plots into his ending. Love Actually merges nine plots into an intricate tapestry of London love where they are all linked together, not so much into one merged plot, but connected plots that get resolved exactly where the movie began, at the arrivals hall at Heathrow Airport. I’ve spent way too much time at that arrivals hall, so it feels very special to me. Several of the stories that comprise the tapestry have a natural musical connection or have a party or show where music is part of the plot. The making of a great romantic comedy, and especially a Christmas one, is a good soundtrack and Love Actually has such a track. But it also has some poignancy with Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman, as well as the whole widower thing with Liam Neeson. There is foiled love caused by Keira Knightley (the scene being made fun of in Love Hard). There is triumphant love by Colin Firth in Marseilles and Colin Frisell in Wisconsin. Richard Curtis even manages to find a spot for Mr. Bean (Rowan Atkinson) in the form of the Harrods jewelry clerk who uses yogurt-coated wrappings to confound Rickman’s infidelities.
One of the hilarious elements that has never really sunk in for me before tonight is that the feel-good ending with all the characters coming together at the Heathrow arrivals hall has as background music The Beach Boys’ song God Only Knows. That is ironic on many levels. To begin with, it was released by Brian Wilson as the B-side of Wouldn’t It Be Nice, which was thought to be the hit. Meanwhile, God Only Knows broke taboo in pop music by invoking the Diety, which was considered uncool. Furthermore, this B song went on to be covered by many other artists and universally acknowledged as the best Beach Boys song ever recorded and, according to some music historians, as the best all-round example of a perfect Sixties song. I find it funny that it was used by Richard Curtis in a movie set almost entirely in the U.K. (even to the point of including Hugh Grant as the newly installed Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street) when the raging competition in the Sixties was between The Beach Boys from sunny California versus the sounds of English pop from The Beatles. I guess since even Paul McCartney has declared that God Only Knows is one of his for rite songs, Curtis thought he could get away with it…and it is the perfect song for the ending.
That song plays over and over and over as we see all nine of the love-interest characters hugging and kissing at Heathrow and the movie fades to titles with a montage of regular people greeting one another in the arrivals hall one after another as the beat of God Only Knows plays on until it fades to black.
While I enjoyed Love Hard and thought its Upstate New York young writer, Daniel Mackey, did a nice job with the film (it only got a Metascore of 42 and doesn’t seem to have garnered any awards), I must disagree with the premise that Love Actually is sappy and goofy and worthy of being satirized in this eighteen year newer film. I doubt sincerely anyone will remember, much less bother to mock, Love Hard in another eighteen years. But I do suspect that people (maybe even me if I can make it to 86 and can even remember the movie at that advanced age) will still be watching Love Actually and going to bed with a warm feeling in their heart.
There is a reason the vast majority of popular songs are about love and that the most enduring tales that have lasted the longest over time are the stories of love. When Eric Segal used his classical training in Greek and Latin and touted those subjects to his Harvard University students in the Sixties, he hit upon the importance of love in much of the classical prose and decided to show the world that you could take a formulaic love story and just by updating it a bit at the fringes, you could sell it to a modern audience. Thus was born Love Story, first as a novella and then made really famous in 1970 by Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw.
Love actually is what makes the world go around and I’m not sure anyone has ever really explained why very convincingly. I think Liam Nelson’s step-son in the movie says it best when he says, “what could be worse than the total agony of love?” As much as we all seek love, we all understand that agony and that sentiment, so Love Hard can just bow to Love Actually and call it a night.