Off with his head! Strip Richard Curtis of his Romantic Comedy Crown

There is irrefutable value in mindless escapism. Separating yourself from your physical reality has become a sign of the times over the past year. Disassociation is the new black. However, now more than ever it is vital to scrutinize the nature of the fantasies we allow ourselves to drift into. The films of Richard Curtis exactly exemplify the kind of escapism that has no place in the context of 2021. It is all too easy to excuse the content through the guise of genre. It’s just a romantic comedy, what could possibly be wrong with it?

The very nature of Curtis’ comedy is questionable. Swearing is continually deployed for cheap laughs. Thinly veiled misogyny is propounded by loveable rogue figures. Fat jokes. Watch Love Actually (2003) and then look me in the eyes and tell me that the fat jokes made about a woman who is a size 14 at most and in the professional context of a manager-talent relationship don’t make your skin crawl. The class implications of weight are too nuanced to get into now but a quick google search will confirm the perception of diet culture being only accessible to the upper classes. The utter void of representation and diversity presents one very singular beauty standard. Julia Roberts blends into Andie MacDowell blends into Rachel McAdams. Hugh Grant. Domhnall Gleeson as ginger Hugh Grant. Richard Curtis conditions the heterosexual female population of Britain to search for emotionally immature boys with floppy hair, perpetrating the idea that women must strive for the attention of mediocre looking men. And the men aren’t safe either. Curtis securely instills trust issues and teaches the need for women to be chased and won. They probably have a secret boyfriend. Or a secret fiancée. Or they’re shagging your brother. And the homosexuals you ask? The lesbian love story was cut from Love Actually in the final edit. Though I am unsure of the exact nature of the narrative, I assume that perhaps Curtis was getting dangerously close to some positive representation.

It is debatable whether the sins of Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) can be absolved. When contextualized in the aftermath of the 1980s housing boom with house prices plummeting whilst unemployment and inflation exponentially rose, it is haunting to watch the lives of upper middle class people negotiated through a series of decadent parties. And though John Hannah’s heart wrenching rendition of Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ remains a masterful scene, the depiction of gay culture in Britain becomes an offensively brief afterthought, relegated to the sidelines of tragedy. Set against a smoke-spewing factory chimney, the carrying of the coffin becomes inadvertently emblematic of all the film ignores. The class divide, the severe recession that characterized Britain at the onset of the 1990s, unemployment, a collapsing housing market and, shockingly, the existence of gay people. ‘Perhaps you will forgive me, if I turn from my own feelings, to the words of another splendid bugger,’ Hannah’s character Michael implores before reciting Auden. Of course we forgive you Michael, but Curtis is another story. Even as he eulogizes his deceased lover, Michael is not permitted to speak explicitly to his own experience, his homosexual identity must be mediated through the words of an established icon of British literature. This nationalistic assertion of celebrated British culture in order to define the love of these men drowns out their homosexual experience in a performance of antiquated traditional Britishness. The film’s ultimate depiction of the gay experience in Britain? They are allowed to be silent or dead.

Nevertheless, Four Weddings and a Funeral does ring the truest out of Curtis’ films. It maintains an effortless charm that is not entirely undermined by its shortcomings. Curtis’ subsequent offerings are what show bad writing, actually, is all around.

‘Worse than the total agony of being in love?’

[No. But not worse than the total agony of watching Love Actually in 2021.]

The continual misogyny and unrealistic expectations are what weave the narratives together, not the alleged spirit of Christmas. The fact we are expected to celebrate as the best friend of Juliet’s (Keira Knightley) husband collects video close ups of her smile as she walks down the aisle for his wank bank and then gaslights her into feeling guilty about it. The fact that Jamie (Colin Firth) shags his cleaner. The fact that I can’t listen to Joni Mitchell without thinking about Karen (Emma Thompson) crying on her bed because her husband didn’t know how to act around his machiavellian secretary. The fact that we’re meant to applaud Colin’s (Kris Martell) sexist odyssey as he goes in search of infamously ‘easy’ American women.

‘Watch out America, here comes Colin Frissell!... And he's got a big knob!’

[translation: ‘Watch out women of America, here comes Colin Frissell!... And he doesn’t see you as human beings!’]

Love Actually is a film that can be allowed to reside very comfortably in 2003. But nearly two decades on, it is time to direct a critical eye towards the values and expectations for men, women and children that these films propound. The majority of the narratives can be defined as centring around stalking or systematic harassment in the workplace.

Curtis’ films herald a bizarre nostalgia for a time that never really existed. Or at least an experience shared by so few, it is barely palpable. A kind of Nietzschean longing for a time nobody ever had; a time it was ok to smoke inside restaurants; a time it was fine to not know anyone who originates from outside of your niche London borough; a time it was acceptable to have strange sexual chemistry with your sister. Even Yesterday (2019), Curtis’ most recent endeavour starring Himesh Patel, does not redeem him. The same British traditionalism that led him to drown out the homosexual experience with Auden’s ‘Funeral Blues’ leads to a narrative essentially asserting that a person of colour could only be successful in a universe where he is able to appropriate the words of The Beatles as his own. We get it. They put you on the new album cover of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, Richard. No need to make a film about it.

Curtis’ love stories follow those of the upper classes so continually unaffected by real life struggles they drift off into fairytale obscurity. No one has ever afforded Notting Hill rent by owning a tiny and unnecessary travel bookshop. It is damaging to continue allowing him to languish as the king of the British romance. I’m not saying that it was wrong to snuggle up with Love Actually on the sofa at Christmas. But the films we turn to for comfort should not be exempt from a critical eye. Broad, positive and progressive representation in the media has never been more important. And the time for old white men being held up as the monarchs of the film industry is coming to a close.

Richard Curtis films are not British culture. In fact, they’re barely culture at all.

May these films teach filmmakers to aim higher and do better.