Gloriously Imperfect: Why Love Actually Still Wins

There is a certain kind of film that critics sharpen their pens against — the kind that dares to be unabashedly warm, that wears its heart somewhere between its sleeve and its forehead. Love Actually is precisely that kind of film, and it has spent two decades defying the contempt it sometimes invites. Writer-director Richard Curtis, already the architect of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, here throws caution to the wind entirely. He does not tell one love story. He tells ten, simultaneously, in the five weeks leading up to Christmas in London.

The structure is, on paper, preposterous. A newly elected Prime Minister (Hugh Grant, doing his most charming Grant) falls for a Downing Street tea lady. A middle-aged widower (Liam Neeson, unexpectedly tender) helps his young stepson pursue a classmate. A writer (Colin Firth, endearingly awkward) finds romance across a language barrier. A rock-and-roll relic (Bill Nighy, magnificently self-aware) tries to revive his career with a satirically terrible Christmas single. Eight more threads weave between them. By rights, none of it should cohere. Somehow, most of it does.

The film’s greatest achievement is tonal control. Curtis keeps the mood light enough to float, yet manages genuine weight in the right moments — nowhere more so than in Emma Thompson’s quietly devastating performance as a wife who suspects betrayal. In a film bursting with grand gestures, her scene alone in a bedroom, composing herself before returning to her children, carries more emotional truth than a dozen airport declarations. It is a reminder that Curtis, underneath the tinsel, understands disappointment as well as he understands joy.

The film is not without its problems, and honesty demands we name them. Several storylines have aged poorly: a subplot involving a character who travels to America treating women as interchangeable commodities plays now as something between dated fantasy and mild embarrassment. The Andrew Lincoln cue-card scene, long lionised as romantic, reads today as rather presumptuous. And with ten plots to service, not all of them get the time they deserve — Chiwetel Ejiofor and Keira Knightley in particular are handed a story the film resolves too quickly and too conveniently.

Yet the film earns its place in the canon not through perfection but through abundance. Every missed beat is compensated by something that lands: the Neeson-Ejiofor friendship, which the film barely has time to develop and yet feels absolutely real; Nighy’s relentless comic timing; the sheer, unguarded pleasure of Hugh Grant dancing through the corridors of Number Ten to the Pointer Sisters. Love Actually is a film made by someone who genuinely believes in love — romantic love, parental love, friendship — and that sincerity, however unfashionable, is not easy to fake.

Measured against cinematic craft, it is imperfect: it is too long, too uneven, and occasionally too convenient. Measured against its own ambitions — to remind an audience, in the darkest month of the year, of the modest, stubborn persistence of human connection — it succeeds completely. The final scene at Heathrow, scored to Craig Armstrong’s swelling piano, asks only that you allow yourself to be moved. Most viewers, after two hours in this company, cannot help but oblige.

Gloriously Imperfect: Why Love Actually Still Wins

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Taissa Farmiga

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