Richard Curtis 's Britain is a strange place where floppy-haired folk go in search of love, and it has made him a global power in cinema, writes Mark Lawson
The favourite accusation against Richard Curtis's films is that he's a Little Englander, setting on celluloid a nation in which the upper middle-classes, after a series of comic misunderstandings, finally blurt "I love you" on a snowy Christmas Eve while Royal Shakespeare Company stalwarts drink mulled wine in the background.
The writer couldn't sue over that stereotype of his plots, but the insult is inaccurate. Little Englanders lock the doors and ignore abroad. Curtis's trick has been to make the parochial global. He's a Big Englander, someone who, like Richard Branson, gambled that his personal values might be more widely shared.
The money and status Curtis has achieved in cinema - with Four Weddings And A Funeral, Notting Hill and now Love Actually - are unlikely for any Englishman in an American business, but even more so for an English writer. Cinema is a director's and actor's medium and, although Curtis has gone behind the camera with Love Actually, his directing début was made possible by the power he gained through his scripts.
When his least-known movie, The Tall Guy, was rereleased on DVD earlier this year, it was tagged: from the writer of Four Weddings And A Funeral and Notting Hill. The designers of DVD sleeves are normally asked to invent a specially tiny type size for the name of the writer.
Apart from his weakness for a Christmas-card England, the other main ammunition of Curtis detractors is a fondness for giving his characters astonishing reversals of fortune. But, in this, he could enter the defence of autobiography.
What's astonishing about the Richard Curtis story is that, as recently as 1993, he was regarded as a minor English comedy writer. His most prestigious credit was the historical TV sitcom Blackadder but, even there, the first series, which he scripted alone, was widely considered inferior to the subsequent three, on which Ben Elton became co-dramatist.
With reviewers and producers tending to see Elton as the saviour of that series, Curtis's greatest cachet came as a sort of Bob Geldof of comedy: creator of the BBC gags-for-famine telethon Comic Relief. At that stage, his most notable work as a solo writer had been Not The Nine O'Clock News, the BBC comedy series that began as a kind of Monty Python's Flying Circus for Thatcherism (like her, it started in 1979) and was certainly Pythonesque in its seeding of significant solo careers: Rowan Atkinson, Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones and Pamela Stephenson were the then unknowns who fronted it.
Not The Nine O'Clock News used teams of writers but Curtis, who had come to the project as Atkinson's personal script man, contributed more sketches than anyone else, as well as the lyrics for the spoof songs that became such a feature of the series. He also became known for making unlikely material funny. A scrap of paper with the lines "Rowan walks down the high street, sees himself in the video camera in a TV shop, makes a face at the window, then bumps into a lamp post" turned out to be one of the show's most famous sketches.
Many writers create a loose pool of talents from which they draw collaborators throughout their career, but Curtis's output is especially suitable to presentation as a diagram with overlapping circles and long, curly arrows. John Lloyd, the producer of Not The Nine O'Clock News, moved on to supervise Blackadder, initially written by Curtis for Rowan Atkinson, whom he had first known at Oxford University. Lloyd had seen a version of Atkinson's Chaplinesque pratfaller Mr Bean in their earliest student theatrical revues. The character later featured in several television series, which were written by Curtis, who also scripted a late-1990s Mr Bean movie, directed by Mel Smith.
Curtis also wrote Atkinson's later stage shows: a success in London but a notorious flop on Broadway. In two ways, though, that theatrical failure led to Curtis's film career. A sketch in which Atkinson gave a speech as the father of the bride, lamenting his daughter's decision to take as her husband the more unpleasant of the two contenders, clearly foreshadows Four Weddings.
Before that, and after an aborted movie for Hollywood producers, was The Tall Guy, Curtis's feature-film-writing début, which, in 1989, added a new arrow to one of his existing talent diagrams - it was Smith's film-directing début - and laid out the tramlines of another: it was produced for a company called Working Title by Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner, whose names would appear with Curtis's on the posters for three of the most profitable British films ever made.
The Tall Guy, which had the misfortune to be patronised in one sense by critics while not patronised in the other by audiences, wasn't one of them. Yet, viewed again today, it shows the outlines of the future Curtis brand with surprising clarity. In a presumably cathartic brand of parody after what had happened to him on Broadway, Atkinson plays Ron Anderson, a mean and egomaniacal comedian with unusually flexible features whose stage show keeps being ruined by the sneezing fits of his American stooge, played by Jeff Goldblum.
In one of those romantic lightning strikes Curtis seems to believe in almost as much as Cupid, Goldblum glances at the nurse giving him injections for allergies - played by Emma Thompson - and knows in seconds that he wants to spend decades with her. What will become another Curtis trope - the wacky-but-wise flatmate - is pioneered by Geraldine James as a nymphomaniac hippy.
Also present in this apprentice effort are the eccentric obscenities - "What in the name of arse is going on?" asks Anderson - and the willingness to sacrifice realism to a gag. When Goldblum and Thompson first have sex at her flat, it is an orgasmic marathon staged across bed, floor, piano, walls and wardrobe. To show that he is in love, Goldblum turns cartwheels in front of a giant moon.
There are various accounts of the genesis of Four Weddings. Apart from the germ of the Atkinson wedding sketch, Curtis has said that he one day calculated that he had been to 72 weekend weddings of friends. He has also said that he wished to explain to his parents why he chose not to marry his girlfriend (now expecting their fourth child), Emma Freud.
Another unusual element in Curtis's working practices is that he likes to employ a close female friend as personal script doctor. Helen Fielding, later to open her own lucrative mine of English comedy with Bridget Jones, was credited as special script consultant on The Tall Guy. Freud is listed as script editor for the subsequent romantic comedies.
Curtis has explained that Freud uses the codes NBG (No Bloody Good) and CDB (Could Do Better). Robert McKie hosts expensive weekend seminars on screenwriting, talking about A plots and B plots and on which page to introduce a secondary theme. The Curtis rules seem to be to set aside several years and allow your lover to tear your drafts apart.
An early reviewer described Four Weddings And A Funeral as a hard film to dislike but one that isn't remotely true. If you wanted to raise a lynch mob of serious film critics, you would only have to point to the emetic sentimentality of giving the hero a brother who can only communicate in sign language and the astonishing convenience of the plot twists that make the leading lady first unavailable to the hero, then available again moments later through one of the rapidest marriages and quickest divorces in the history of human relationships.
For a romantic comedy, the film also took serious risks with its leads. The chemistry of a rom-com is simple: at least half the audience should want to have sex with one of the stars. But both Hugh Grant, as the spouse-avoiding Charles, and Andie McDowell, as the enigmatic US love interest who challenges his bachelorhood, are actors of the kind you want to either shag or strangle.
Yet, no matter how cynically you go in, you are forced to admit that this was one of those mysterious moments when the gods of scriptwriting decide to smile on someone hunched over a typewriter. The cleverness of the title - the final word alerting the audience that the comedy will at one moment stop - plays off in the remarkable scenes that follow the fatal collapse of Simon Callow's Gareth.
You could ask 100 screenwriters to write Gareth's funeral and not one would have come up with the idea of his boyfriend reading out a speech from a forgotten play by W. H. Auden: lines, what's more, that were intended as a ridiculously over-the-top parody of a funeral eulogy, written for a dead politician. Although Curtis clearly has wit, his greatest gift as a writer may be agility. His plots can be regarded as a series of deep and potentially fatal holes that he digs for himself before somehow clambering out.
Curtis's reaction to the film's success was characteristically English. Four Weddings earned him a honeymoon of long holidays, sabbaticals to work on Comic Relief and a British television sitcom, The Vicar Of Dibley, for Dawn French, that again demonstrated this writer's unusual ability to combine the cutting edge - the issue of women priests in the Church of England - with the cosy: English countryside, the daffy middle classes and ceremonies in which farm animals are blessed.
There was also the slow progress towards another movie, which, by 1999, was Notting Hill. Curtis's Big Englander complex - the belief that the concerns of a small island can concern the world - was shown by his decision to set this film in the streets outside his west London home. Grant, who Curtis had now made a big star, again played a single man - bad at commitment and finishing sentences - who falls in love with the United States' biggest film star when, true to the rules of the Curtis universe, she happens to drop in to his Notting Hill bookshop. In a British film of the 1970s or 1980s, the United States' biggest film star would have been played by an English sitcom actress after two days with a dialogue coach. But, demonstrating what Four Weddings had started for Working Title and Curtis, she was played, in a swaggering piece of typecasting, by Julia Roberts.
After Notting Hill, Curtis did some polishing of a script - on which his old friend Helen Fielding and Andrew Davies had worked - for Bridget Jones's Diary, which also involved Grant, Bevan and Fellner. Then, after years of abandoning the sections Ms Freud considered not bloody good enough, came Love Actually, a portmanteau romance involving nine love stories. Passion surprises characters as diverse as Hugh Grant as a bachelor prime minister falling for his tea lady, Martine McCutcheon, and a little boy whose mother has just died consulting his stepdad on how to deal with his crush for the cool girl at school.
Most successful populist artists have discovered a formula, and a fat dossier of coincidences can be accumulated after spending a weekend with the movies Curtis has written. Sudden, overwhelming love at first sight occurs in The Tall Guy, Four Weddings, Notting Hill, Love Actually and Bridget Jones's Diary. All five end with a desperate dash against time to make the declaration or save the relationship. In both Bridget Jones's Diary and Love Actually, the climactic declarations of desire take place on Christmas Eve. Barmy but warm-hearted housemates figure in The Tall Guy, Four Weddings and Notting Hill.
If the writer's - now writer-director's - detractors are right that his films cannily construct an England for Americans, then the strategy has failed this time. Love Actually received a very rude review in the New York Times and cold notices in other US publications, whose critics may have been irritated by the familiar plot and dialogue.
And, to borrow the Freudian code, Love Actually certainly isn't NBG. But it does frequently feel CDB. The weaknesses come from what has always been, though admittedly for critics rather than audiences, the Richard Curtis Problem: his curious attitude to reality.
As with many artistic characteristics, this may have its roots in childhood. The son of a Unilever executive, he grew up in New Zealand, Manila and Stockholm, among other places dictated by Dad's postings. And the England of Curtis films, in which snow always falls on Christmas Eve on beautiful mews houses, is recognisably a fantasy of expats.
But if Curtis is often accused of cosiness and sentimentality, his softness takes a complicated shape. It is a surprise to note that, of the films he has written, only Bean can legally be seen by children: the British censors have generally given him a 15 certificate. This is partly because British film watchdogs are generally stricter on loose tongues than flying fists, and Curtis shows a continued delight - very English public school, to his critics - in swearing. Apart from the "f**k" fusillade that begins most sections of Four Weddings, Grant also gets to yell seven "buggers" in succession in the vestry. The attraction of bad language continues in Love Actually, in which the inappropriate oaths go to a 10-year-old boy.
But, even if the higher certificates are imposed as a sort of swear box, they are correct because, under all the snow and romance, there is a darkness in Curtis's work that keeps trying to peep through. The dumping of "Duck Face" at the altar in Four Weddings is a scene of such remarkable cruelty that only the tactical use of the cute mute brother as the captain of the action - another example of Curtis climbing out of a seemingly hopeless hole - can hold the film within its chosen genre of romantic comedy.
Curtis has hinted that he is through with floppy-haired Englishmen finding commitment at the eleventh hour: Love Actually alarmingly includes no less than three such hopeless blokes. His next film, he has said, may be about "a social issue", although he may reflect on the bruising reviews his old friend and collaborator Helen Fielding has had after changing genre in her latest novel. And the fans of Annie Hall and Manhattan wouldn't follow Woody Allen to his Bergmanesque experiments such as Shadows And Fog.
A Bergmanesque Curtis is hard to imagine, but it seems clear that one of the most unlikely and lucrative strains of work in cinema - a rare example of lightning striking the British film industry - is coming to an end. The latest instalment leaves you feeling that, in the end, love actually isn't all that cinema is about.
- Guardian service
