And the reason he doesn’t get enough credit does seem to be because of the kind of movies he’s known for: romantic comedies, the “chick flick” genre to use an antiquated term. Further, they aren’t the American brand of masculine-friendly romantic comedies, often based in broad jokes and premises or else sex comedies of the like of Judd Apatow. Rather they’re movies that genuinely deal with love in between the humour, and express a very optimistic idea of love. The kind that Hollywood romances used to do, but presented through a stylish modern lens. And because of that, his movies are often lambasted or dismissed by critics and audiences too stagnantly cynical or intellectually immature to take them seriously. And I’m guilty of this too. Despite Curtis having co-written my favourite T.V. show since I was in high school, and being a major writing influence because of it, it was years before I actually watched any of his movies.
Speaking before the BAFTA Screenwriters Series in 2013, he said, “I’m sometimes puzzled by the fact that when I write films about people falling in love, they are critically taken to be sentimental and unrealistic. And yet, four million people in London are in love tonight and today all around the world hundreds of thousands of people will fall in love …I think stories of joy and love are definitely worth telling, and I’m a beneficiary of that.”
Richard Curtis’ movies are often idealized depictions of falling in love, because that’s what romance is -but that itself is never a bad thing. Some romantic comedies can follow a more realistic trajectory and work, like The Big Sick for example, but the escapism of the rom-com has an incredibly valuable purpose. We love seeing people in the movies fall in love, and contrived circumstances, unique gestures and the like done right accentuate our experience with the film. No one really cares that Hugh Grant was an idiot to admit his love for another woman at the altar, or that Andrew Lincoln’s cue card profession to Keira Knightley was intrusive, or that to some degree both actions were selfish -it’s the power of the moments’ emotionality and conviction that matters. And Curtis can execute these moments like no other, even as recently as in Yesterday.
Which is partly what prompted me to do Richard Curtis Month this September. Yesterday is the first movie he’s written in five years, and it comes the same year as the twenty-fifth anniversary of his break-out movie Four Weddings and a Funeral -which he commemorated with a Red Nose Day reunion special back in March. So it’s been a significant year for him. Why not revisit his movies now? Every Wednesday this month I’ll be covering one of his key films, spanning his screenwriting and directing career -with the notable exceptions of the two Bridget Jones movies (which he co-wrote) and that Christmas one because it’s September.
So let’s steam ahead with the movie that first put him on the map. What’s perhaps most striking about Four Weddings and a Funeral, despite how big it’s become in the last twenty-five years, is how modest it is. It was clearly made relatively on the cheap over just longer than a month at several insubstantial filming locations. There isn’t much interesting about its visual choices, by nature of its story being confined largely to churches and occasional banquet halls, and the costuming rarely varies (you do tire of looking at elegant morning suits). It’s a movie about fairly wealthy people, but without much opulence on screen, and perhaps it’s why the movie works. None of Curtis’ subsequent films would be this bare-bones. Even his debut of a few years prior, a bizarre cartoon of a showbiz romantic comedy called The Tall Guy (in which Emma Thompson likewise made her movie debut), was accented by Mel Smith’s surreal direction.
The charm of Four Weddings though, when it’s not coming from its script or actors, is coming from this aesthetic, much like the charm of a far less known but similarly affable English tragi-comedy Peters’ Friends. The director Mike Newell, isn’t really known for having much of a style or skill beyond mere competence (he made the most aesthetically dull Harry Potter film after all), but here that lack of vision takes the form of a welcome minimalism that allows the story and actors to take centre stage. And whatever else, Newell is a good director of actors, having instigated the awkwardly posh, befuddled affect that would follow Hugh Grant’s entire career.
The cast is the movies’ greatest blessing. Sure, Andie McDowell is simply serviceable as Carrie, a love interest constructed a little thinly to begin with -there’s an interesting story there to her short marriage to Corin Redgrave that we’re not privy to due to Grant’s Charles being our POV character. But everyone else is really impressionable. Four Weddings is famous for being the movie that launched Hugh Grant’s career, and in fairness he is very good in the role despite Curtis’ reservations; but it’s not often credited for doing the same for Kristin Scott Thomas, Simon Callow, John Hannah, and James Fleet. That whole gang, also including the late Charlotte Coleman and David Bower, make the movie not only great, but eminently re-watchable. Kristin Scott Thomas plays a wealthy socialite who’s also down-to-earth and relatable -how?? Simon Callow and John Hannah are a rambunctious, warm, and proud gay couple in a time when that was a rarity in movies (hell it still is), and Charlotte Coleman is a crudely endearing spitfire allowed to be Grants’ platonic flatmate. You could argue this is a movie as much about friendship as it is about love, and maybe that’s because of the insistently endearing chemistry of this ensemble. Even with their varied backgrounds that would seem a construct for a sitcom, they are a sincerely believable group of friends, and each one of them gets a moment to shine -whether it be through Hannah’s emotional Auden-quoting speech, Fleet’s commiserating feelings on love and bachelorhood, Coleman’s cute conversation with a flower girl under a reception table, Callow’s boisterous encouragement of courtship, or Bower’s sign language objection at his brothers’ wedding. The best though is from Scott Thomas’ Fiona in the scene where she privately confesses her unrequited love for Charles, not in a dramatic way or a searingly emotional way, but in a sombre matter-of-fact way through her composed elegance. There’s a tragedy there that is not only heartbreaking, but speaks to a concealed vulnerability hidden beneath her refinement and humour -and it’s not apparent in Curtis’ script alone.
But as much as this scene is a reminder of how good and somewhat underrated an actress Kristin Scott Thomas is, it also shows that Curtis is aware of the pangs of unrequited affections. While his movies are often stories of true love, love at first sight, and following the heart, he does acknowledge the truth that it doesn’t always work out that way (I mean, just look at a couple of the relationships in Love, Actually). But it’s not what he, as a dreamer, chooses to focus on. I think he’s very conscious of the fact that his movies function as a kind of romance wish fulfilment, because that’s what they are to him. Though tinged with elements of biography, the central notion of Four Weddings, that of meeting and falling in love with someone at a wedding, was a romantic fantasy of his that he simply wanted to turn into a movie. Curtis isn’t so much interested in the honesty of building relationships (that’s for people like Richard Linklater and Charlie Kaufman to explore) because he’s an optimist, and genuinely wants to spread the ultimate love and happiness of his characters. Sure he’ll explore ideas of love and of life with and without it, but he’ll come around to letting his leads experience it in the end. And he expresses that very well through combining heartfelt sentiment with relatable character and a classically hip sense of humour.
No stone is left unturned either. Everyone is in a happy relationship by the end of Four Weddings, including (and especially importantly) Anna Chancellor’s discarded bride, easily the most wronged character in the movie. Curtis enjoys indulging in that shared happiness, he even seems to take unironic delight in the purposely outrageous lust between Bernard and Lydia (David Haig and Sophie Thompson). And because of that enthusiasm for romance, it doesn’t so much matter that Charles and Carrie aren’t a terribly engaging couple who only meet a handful of times after their initial night together. The scenes they do share, even at their most awkward, have a resonating heart to them, a relatable bashfulness (even on her part) and exuberant passion, and I think that’s a key reason the movie took off the way it did.
Curtis’ screenplay accomplished this while also being very neatly composed. It isn’t any wonder it was nominated for an Oscar, what with its strong character writing (for the most part), graceful flow, storytelling originality and thematic poignancy, utterly unique idiosyncratic voice, and sharply funny dialogue. What’s a little more surprising is that the movie itself was nominated for an Oscar, alongside The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show, and Forrest Gump –that particular Award brand doesn’t usually recognize comedies, and for all of its sincere romanticism, Four Weddings is a comedy. Its characters are funny, its situations are funny, Curtis is equally fond of sight gags (the impromptu rings for the first wedding) and witty dialogue (practically everything out of Gareth’s mouth), as anyone who’s seen Blackadder can tell you. His sketch comedy background shines through in sequences like Charles’ confinement in the room where a newlywed Bernard and Lydia have wildly insatiable sex, and the memorable marriage conducted by a bumbling Rowan Atkinson that could have been lifted straight from a routine the two had written together at Oxford. Curtis’ brand of humour, a mix between a charmingly creative “fluffy” English boomer sensibility and a youthfully transgressive energy, sets a tone rather uniquely. It’s just pervasive enough to be enjoyed by the whole family, yet sharp enough to not feel tame.
For a movie about weddings (and a funeral) that is thus steeped in formal traditionalist and church imagery, it’s nice that the movie ends with the central couple (both of whom have had failed weddings) deciding against marriage in a cute non-proposal. It’s almost like an iconoclastic refutation of the institution of matrimony at the end of a film seeming to be, if not directly advocating, than a normalization of conventional heterosexual marriage. It’s a decidedly modern end to the film, one that fits Curtis’ thesis on love, which in spite, or perhaps in earnest of the couples’ happy end, is an echo of that great Tennyson declaration “tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” Experiencing or feeling love is the very best thing. Four Weddings is a decent romance, a pretty good comedy, though it has all the vigour of a classic love story -which I guess is what it has become.
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