Love Actually: one thing we really should cancel

By now, pretty much all pop culture from the (aptly named) Noughties has been retrospectively denounced: the sitcoms were too white, the female celebrities were treated horrendously, and let’s not even get started on the TV presenters. But there is one relic from that era that has remained astonishingly impervious to cancel culture. Love Actually turns 20 this week, and it is the one product of that time whose reputation has grown with age.

Back when it was released, Love Actually was generally seen as fine, if not a patch on Richard Curtis and Hugh Grant’s earlier (and much funnier) films, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. Since then it has become a bona fide Christmas film, overtaking other (far superior) ones such as Die Hard and Trading Places. It is now widely seen as up there with the heretofore unassailable king of Christmas films, It’s a Wonderful Life. When I was still living in the US a decade ago, I heard that one TV channel showed Love Actually on a loop for the entire Christmas week. Rumours that this is why America then went collectively insane and soon afterwards elected a reality TV star as president are still being investigated.

It shouldn’t be like this because, unlike the too-white sitcoms and the dodgy TV presenters, Love Actually was, even to us unenlightened troglodytes in 2003, quite obviously a wrong ’un. At The Times and The Sunday Times Cheltenham Literary Festival last month Curtis conceded that he had some regrets about the film, mainly that it suffered from a lack of diversity and that the frequent jokes about Martine McCutcheon — who plays a tea lady in 10 Downing Street — being fat “aren’t any longer funny”. Yet that isn’t because people have become more sensitive about fat jokes in the past 20 years — although they have — but because McCutcheon wasn’t fat in the first place, so the jokes about her thighs were never funny, just weird.

But then, nothing in Love Actually ever made sense; after all, the film opens with Grant musing, “Whenever I feel gloomy about the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow.”

Record scratch! Sorry, I’m gonna have to stop you there, Hugh: to cheer yourself up, you think about people with long-haul-flight-induced bad breath searching in vain for their lost luggage and a minicab driver who went to the wrong terminal? Because that is what every sane person associates with that nightmarish hellhole. But Grant, ie Curtis, sees Heathrow as proof that “love actually is all around”. If, perhaps, not your luggage, which is now en route to Laos. Truly, only someone who flies first class, as I assume Curtis does, could have happy associations with an airport.

As you might have gathered, I am not a fan of Love Actually, and this is not because of any intellectual snobbery. On the contrary, I am American (therefore a sucker for Curtis’s Oxbridgey version of Englishness) and Jewish (Jews love Christmas movies, and that’s a scientific fact). Love Actually should be so far up my boulevard that I live in it. But I don’t, because it is a film in which none of the plotlines work, which is almost impressive, given there are eight. Plus, it’s a rom-com in which “love” is depicted as a powerful man (Grant playing the PM, Alan Rickman playing a boss of a generic trendy company, Colin Firth playing Colin Firth) sleazing over a woman who works for him (respectively, the tea lady, his secretary and his cleaning lady who doesn’t speak English).

Or perhaps you prefer the touching love story in which a man (Andrew Lincoln) secretly films his best friend’s wife (Keira Knightley), and when she finds out, he murders her, skins her and wears her as a costume — sorry, I mean, she thinks it’s sweet and kisses him. Incidentally, Knightley was 18 — 18! — when the film came out, while Lincoln was 30, just in case that storyline wasn’t sufficiently creepy for you.

As for Kris Marshall shacking up with three hot American women because “American girls seriously dig a cute British accent”, well, let’s just say international wars have started over lesser insults, Curtis.

But arguing with Love Actually is the equivalent of Grampa Simpson shaking his fist at the clouds. While plenty of other (better) films have been deemed “problematic”, Love Actually merrily sails on, even though it was widely agreed in the MeToo era that workplace sexual harassment and stalking are bad, and those two activities are what Love Actually thinks are actually love. And this causes a conflict for me, because while on the one hand I think cancelling pop culture from the past for not adhering to today’s attitudes is stupid, on the other I wish Love Actually would be buried at sea. Really, it’s almost as confusing as a Love Actually plotline.

Why has Love Actually avoided cancellation? Two reasons, I think: first, it’s such a deranged film that it evades any kind of criticism, like a hyperactive toddler in a school nativity play who falls off the stage. No one’s going to complain about lack of acting talent there, are they? Second, I think the generation that generally does the cancelling (that is, millennials) have such fond childhood memories of this film that they have given it a light pass. They’ll tut at the fat jokes but they won’t kill the film, just as they’ll tell off their parents for using dated terminology but won’t disown them.

Silly millennials, says this Gen X-er. Thank heavens I’m more mature and therefore prefer The Muppet Christmas Carol.