We’re less than 10 weeks away from Christmas, which means that a film which will soon be inescapable is Love Actually. The 2003 romantic comedy was written and directed by Richard Curtis, and follows several different overlapping storylines that culminate at Christmas.
Some people adore Love Actually, and some people would rather stab themselves repeatedly with a rusty fork than have to watch so much as a minute of it ever again. Even those who fall into the former camp have to admit, however, that there are parts of the film that are … problematic, chief among them presenting a stalker as a sympathetic figure (every time Andrew Lincoln turns up at Keira Knightley’s door with those flash cards, I want to scream “Call the cops! Call your husband! Slam the door in his face, he’s a creep!”).
Overall, I find the film very curate’s egg-ish: parts of it are very good, and they pretty much balance out the parts that aren’t. Emma Thompson’s raw portrayal of a woman who thinks her husband is having an affair, for example, is a gut punch every time, while Bill Nighy as a washed-up rock star trying for one more hit is a sheer delight. And no one can do cheerfully annoying like Rowan Atkinson, who steals his scene as an overly-helpful shop assistant, to the annoyance of an increasingly-irritated Alan Rickman.
That said, the film has come in for its share of criticism in the two decades since it was released, and much of that criticism is directed at the treatment of Natalie, played by Martine McCutcheon. She is a staffer at Number 10 Downing Street, working closely with Hugh Grant’s newly-elected prime minister, and it soon becomes apparent that they’re falling for each other. So Grant’s character does what anyone would do in that situation: sees to it that she loses her position at Number 10 and is shuffled off somewhere else so he doesn’t have to be troubled by her presence in his life any more.
Ouch. Worse than that, however, is how she’s described. Natalie’s colleague Annie calls her “the chubby girl” and comments on her “sizeable arse and huge thighs”. Natalie’s father refers to her, to her face, as “plumpy”. It’s clear that Natalie herself has internalized this body-shaming, explaining at one point that she got dumped because “nobody wants a girlfriend with thighs the size of tree trunks.”
Now, Martine McCutcheon is not, in any way, shape, or form, chubby or plump. It’s true that she’s not TV- or movie-thin (size 0 or 2); she’s probably a real-world size 6, which makes her slim by any metric. Quite why Curtis chose to make her size a thing to be played for laughs is unknown; even if she wasn’t obviously slim, making fun of someone because of their size simply isn’t funny.
To his credit (I guess), Curtis himself now admits this, although it took him 20 years to get there. At a recent appearance at a literature festival, Curtis said he regretted the “fat jokes” in Love Actually: “In my generation, calling someone chubby [was funny] – in Love Actually there were jokes about that. Those jokes aren’t any longer funny.”
I have to disagree with Curtis, who was born in 1956. It’s not that “fat jokes” are no longer funny; they never were. And despite what some people would have you believe, there was never a wonderful time when fat jokes were amusing, just as there was no golden age where sexual harassment was A-OK.
Nevertheless, it’s a line of defence people keep trotting out with weary regularity: “They were different times, it was acceptable back then.” No. Accepted, perhaps, because the perpetrators liked it that way and the victims kept silent out of shame or fear, but it was never acceptable. There’s a big difference.
Curtis’s admission won’t change the film, although it might — just about — make the scenes with Natalie a bit easier to take. Andrew Lincoln’s character, though? Still a creep. Feel free to yell at the screen.
