The first images we see in “Love Actually” are real-life human beings joyously reuniting at London’s Heathrow Airport, as a voice-over intones, “Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion is starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed. But I don’t see that. Seems to me that love is everywhere. Often, it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there … If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.”
That we eventually learn this lovely and unabashedly corny sentiment is voiced by the prime minister of the United Kingdom only strengthens the case that Richard Curtis’ perennial holiday favorite, while ostensibly grounded in a myriad of semi-plausible storylines, is also a live-action fairytale. It’s a romantic comedy about romantic comedies, swaddling itself in rom-com tropes, from the characters who fall in love despite hardly knowing each other to the guy who feigns dislike of a girl because he’s secretly in love with her to the poor fool who comes home to find out his girlfriend is sleeping with his brother to the mad dash through the airport to declare one’s intentions to someone who’s leaving on a jet plane.
