All of Curtis’s films are as sweet and indulgent as fudge cake, and, like a
cat on your bed, are designed to soothe. Whether he is behind the camera or
has a guiding hand on the script, every one is a reliable treat, with sharp,
funny dialogue delivered by a feast of British talent, playing loveable
characters whose eccentricities and frailties beguile us.
Take Notting Hill, in which Hugh Grant wears his prescription diving mask on a
date after his idiot flatmate loses his glasses. When Grant, a bookshop
owner, brings the American movie star Anna (Julia Roberts), to a dinner
party, it’s all so familiar: the marvellous house, wit, wine and splendid
food, as well as a mouthy stockbroker honking about money.
Everything you yearn for in your weakest or most human moments – for all to be
well – is granted in a Curtis film. People love helplessly, cheat, and mourn
in raw, beautiful agony. No matter that every emotion is managed and
choreographed.
We feel what his characters feel. When Matthew (John Hannah) reads WH Auden’s
poem Stop All the Clocks at the funeral of his partner, Gareth (Simon
Callow), I bawl; I feel choked even thinking of it. Emotion isn’t false just
because it’s quickly accessed.
Curtis’s particular talent is to paint a gently scathing, mostly adoring
portrait of bumbling but comfortable middle-class Brits, those who trundle
along, who are capable of great love but emotionally inarticulate. I refer
you to my favourite scene in Bridget Jones’s Diary, in which Firth and Grant
fight: no manly left hooks, just a shambles of weak scrapping.
His films are also a love letter to Britain, to its heritage and its people.
Not since the Kinks has our capital been so fondly depicted by a single
auteur. In Love Actually, as Hugh Grant’s prime minister says, in a gentle
poke in the eye for America: “We may be a small country, but we are a great
one. The country of Churchill, Shakespeare…” This, plus rousing music,
brings a lump to my throat.
Curtis once declared he’d been to 72 weekends of weddings – he thus knows that
we love such occasions, though we don’t necessarily love to attend them.
From Rowan Atkinson’s vicar in Four Weddings referring to the “Holy Goat”,
to the home video in Love Actually that reveals to Keira Knightley that her
new husband’s best friend has always been besotted with her, Curtis shows an
exquisite touch for picking out those poignant, precious, delightful and
awful details, and doesn’t always offer a Hollywood happy ending.
Yes, his is a sanitised reality, but it is a reality. Richard Curtis films are
derided for their lack of truth, but they contain great emotional truth: for
me, they are as painfully accurate as anything by Mike Leigh. Only Curtis’s
characters find redemption; forgiveness, if deserved, is granted.
We can only hope that Curtis’s is an ”artistic’’ retirement: temporary and
reversible. Love does actually make the world go round, and we need Curtis
to remind us.
Jim White: His cinematic vision is as floppy as Hugh Grant’s fringe,
actually
It would be wrong to suggest that our response to Richard Curtis’s work
depends entirely on our sex. After all, I know plenty of women who would
rather stick their head in a barrel of custard and gargle their way through
Blue’s greatest hits than sit through one of his films.
Indeed, the news that About Time may be the last he is to direct will come as
a relief to anyone of either sex who has wandered into a cinema in
anticipation of being entertained, and found themselves instead immersed in
Curtisland, that strange world in which declarations of love always come at
Christmas time, flatmates are loveable oddballs, and every romantic hero has
a disabled sibling.
After the terrible trauma inflicted by Love Actually, the news that Curtis may
be about to fold up his director’s chair means some of us may be able once
more to venture into the cinema without fear of being submerged in
Sloane-com slush.
He is a strange case, Richard Curtis. An honest, decent and humanitarian man,
a charitable titan in his stewardship of Comic Relief, his work is clearly
intended to make the world a kinder, gentler place. He sees humour as a
benevolent thing, something that will make us all get along. He wants us to
see things as he does: all lovely and sweet and tied up with a big Christmas
bow.
It is one of the paradoxes of modern entertainment that his work should
generate a response almost diametrically opposed to such benevolent purpose.
Frankly, the very thought of watching Notting Hill again is enough to send
many of us into a frothing stew of discontent. Wars have been declared for
less provocative acts than charging money to observe the mating ritual of
the stuttering toff. A good proportion of the population would choose root
canal work over another chance to see Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts bill and
coo.
The odd thing about Curtis is that not everything he touches turns to guff.
His career encompasses everything from unequivocal comedy genius (Blackadder
Goes Forth) through the cosy fuzz of sitcom (The Vicar of Dibley) to items
so drowning in saccharine they make you want to hurl sharpened objects at
the screen (War Horse, the movie).
As a scriptwriter over the past 20 years, even his most vociferous detractors
(that is, half the cinema-goers of Britain) would accept that Curtis has few
British peers. Any man responsible for the final scene of Blackadder, the
moment when Edmund, Darling and Baldrick head over the top in slow motion
and the grim churn of the Western Front slowly transforms into a field of
poppies, deserves every Bafta currently gathering dust on his mantelpiece.
The problems arise when he stations himself in the director’s chair and the
filter of collaboration is removed. When he is in charge of the train set,
the vision he delivers is one of suffocating twee. What John Lloyd, the
presiding genius behind Blackadder, brought to that show was the prism of
cynicism, the grit that made the oyster. Without it, Curtis is as floppy as
the fringe of his cinematic alter ego, Hugh Grant.
But the biggest problem with Curtis the film-maker is that, as his star has
inexorably risen, so his way has come to be seen as the template of
box-office success. Not his fault, perhaps, but his influence is everywhere
in a hundred imitators.
Over the past decade, there has been many a Britflick that appears to have his
fingerprints all over the viewfinder. The risible Johnny English canon,
About A Boy, The Wedding Video: while not directly guilty for their
immediate creation, it is plausible to suggest that none would have been
made if it were not for the success of Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Talking of which, what is the most memorable scene in that first cinematic
outing for Britain’s most influential current film maker? It is the one at
the funeral in which the boyfriend of the deceased reads from WH Auden. The
interesting thing about that work is that the poet wrote it originally as a
parody of the over-the-top graveside oration. That Curtis should achieve
prominence by turning a cynical gag into a tear-drenched moment of high
schmaltz should, in itself, serve as the most suitable eulogy for his
film-making career.
Article source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/10214060/Richard-Curtis-Sharp-and-funny-or-suffocatingly-twee.html