Thursday, August 11, 2005
No, actually
My wife and I watched Love Actually on DVD last night. The very best thing I can say about the experience is that it confirmed one of the reasons I love my wife: except for choosing a husband, she has very good taste. She agreed with me that it was awful.
The reasons, sadly, are totally predictable for a mainstream film in our culture. "Love," in this movie, is almost always either defined as "sexual desire" or as a fleeting, mostly selfish emotional condition. There is a brief glimpse of genuine love--in the story of a sister who sacrifices her own happiness to be a reliable caretaker for her mentally-ill brother. But the movie pretty quickly dispenses with this story, because it's not very interested in her. It's busy showing adolescent wish-fulfillment and bashing marriage.
One of the "love stories" entangled in the film does lead to a marriage proposal--between two people who have only just learned the rudiments of each other's languages and don't really know each other or have anything in common except they spent a few weeks around each other, being clumsy and not communicating. None of the positive stories of love take place within a marriage. In fact, marriage on the whole takes a beating. We've got:
The reasons, sadly, are totally predictable for a mainstream film in our culture. "Love," in this movie, is almost always either defined as "sexual desire" or as a fleeting, mostly selfish emotional condition. There is a brief glimpse of genuine love--in the story of a sister who sacrifices her own happiness to be a reliable caretaker for her mentally-ill brother. But the movie pretty quickly dispenses with this story, because it's not very interested in her. It's busy showing adolescent wish-fulfillment and bashing marriage.
One of the "love stories" entangled in the film does lead to a marriage proposal--between two people who have only just learned the rudiments of each other's languages and don't really know each other or have anything in common except they spent a few weeks around each other, being clumsy and not communicating. None of the positive stories of love take place within a marriage. In fact, marriage on the whole takes a beating. We've got:
- A bleak tale of a man accepting the most pathetic, trampy come-on from a coworker and destroying his marriage
- A tale of newlyweds who are very happy together--and the "best friend" of the husband, who is in love/sexually obsessed with the wife and makes a little play to seduce her "because it's Christmas"
- The story I mentioned above about the bilingual marriage proposal. What makes it especially interesting is that the guy doing the proposing just found out five weeks ago that his wife was cheating on him. Can they even be divorced yet? It's a good thing he's not on the rebound, or his new marriage might be in trouble.
- And the most heartwarming tale of marriage commitment, the man who grieves for his dead wife for an entire five weeks before getting the hots for some blonde he just met. You know you have a good tale of love when you inspire comparisons to the villain in Hamlet.
Even the best stories in the film are kind of pathetic, and usually pretty obvious. Nothing really surprised me that much, including that in a film with Christmas as its setting and thematic heart, the only mention of Jesus is when someone swears using his name.
I'm sure some people had a more positive response than I did. If you felt uplifted by the actor stand-ins shyly making first steps together, or by the rock star admitting that the manager he publicly abuses is actually his closest friend, okay. But you should just be aware that actually there is much more powerful, deeper, richer love than this all around. Moviemakers just don't seem to know where to look for it, or how to recognize it.
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I remember liking this movie, but as I've told you, I don't remember why. I remember being vaguely impressed with the fact that they at least included the story of the sister giving up romantic love to take care of her brother because he needed her. The other one that I liked was the story of the woman who realized that her husband was cheating on her and she basically left him. I also appreciated that. She really loved him, but she realized that staying with him was stupid. So, yes, you're right, it was probably largely a craptastic movie that I enjoyed because it was very late when I saw it, but I can't completely hate it because of those two plot lines. Then again, I only saw it once, so I may just have been tired after all. They did basically equate love with sex, which is what movie makers do because they simply don't get it. Sometimes I think this is because when you have that much money, you can't have real relationships.
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