Love Actually is a strange beast of a film. It straddles various definitions in such a way that it falls into multiple categories without necessarily fitting into any of them. Is it a Christmas movie or just a movie that takes place on and around Christmas? Is it a comedy or a drama? Does it feature an ensemble cast or is it really more a series of small-cast vignettes? And, for our purposes today, is it a British film or an American film?
Written and directed by Richard Curtis, Love Actually has a cast and production team that causes it to lean toward the British end of the spectrum. Aside from the overwhelmingly British cast, Curtis himself has been behind more than a few projects that are more easily classified. His hand was in the script for The Girl in the Cafe and even some of Rowan Atkinson's Blackadder series. Then again, Curtis also penned much of Notting Hill and both movies in the Bridget Jones series. In the case of those latter two, we get the basis for the argument that Love Actually is, ahem, actually an American film. Both Notting Hill and the Bridget Jones outings were basically American-style movies with British accents. They followed standard American rom-com structures using actors that are extremely familiar to American audiences. In the case of Bridget Jones the lead role even went to an American actress, Renee Zellweger.
The cast of Love Actually is also full of familiar faces, at least mostly. American audiences have known Alan Rickman since Die Hard and have spent plenty of time with Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson and Liam Neeson. At the time, Keira Knightley was pretty much unknown to US audiences, at least those who hadn't gone to little indie theaters to see Bend It Like Beckham, but there's no doubt that Knightley was selected for her Hollywood-level star potential. The same could be said for the then-underexposed Chiwetal Ejiofor. Still, others in the cast had essentially zero exposure in the States with no prospect outside of Love Actually to remedy that. Kris Marshall, who plays the goofy Colin Frissell, is a sitcom standard in England but nobody west of Ireland is going to see much of him without a subscription to BBC America. In this straddler of a movie, there are even some straddling actors. Colin Firth, Bill Nighy and Martin Freeman have all become well-known State-side, even if they began as quintessentially English actors.
But what really makes me question whether or not we can call Love Actually a British film is its structure. A collaboration between the very European Studio Canal and the very American Universal Studios, Love Actually has all the high-budget gloss of an American blockbuster. It goes to great lengths, however shiny, to subvert the predictable storytelling of American romantic comedies. Its genius is in the fact that Love Actually is composed of the plots of about a dozen insufferable movies, the scraps of which have been sewn together to make one fairly stunning movie. Multiple gushy romances, dire heartbreakers, sappy family stories and one goofy sex comedy (just for good measure) make up the tapestry-style screenplay. Some of those plots, like the father-son thread with Liam Neeson and precocious cupid-victim Thomas Sangster, are obviously American in approach. Others, most notably the painful infidelity drama with Rickman and Thompson, could only be British films were they drawn out to feature-length.
So, what is Love Actually? Is it British enough to call it a foreign film? Sort of. The key, I believe, is in Curtis's opening monologue. In it, he references September 11th and how it changed the world. While I'm not cynical enough to think that nobody outside the United States cared about 9/11, I do think the majority of its cultural impact took place in America. By referring to our most prominent national tragedy, Richard Curtis is directly addressing us, his American audience. Love Actually isn't exactly an American movie. Or rather, it isn't an American movie made by Americans. Love Actually is a British movie made by British people as a sort of gift to American audiences. However subversive it is with its rearrangement of American movie archetypes, it does so lovingly, not bitterly. This is a present in film form designed by Richard Curtis to bring smiles back to a downtrodden American audience, using modes that audience knows and loves. I honestly don't believe Love Actually could have been done by an American writer or a predominantly American cast. it's foreign, but it's in our language.