Loving ‘Love Actually’

SIR – Tim Robey (Arts, November 24) thinks Love Actually is “the embarrassing uncle of British film”.

It’s not woke enough, apparently. Or funny. Or credible. Whoever heard of an unmarried British prime minister? How about Edward Heath? Or Boris Johnson, when he came into office?

Mr Robey is wrong to think that all “major” critics loathed the film. America’s leading critics of their day – Stanley Kauffmann, Andrew Sarris and Roger Ebert – all reviewed it favourably.

Mr Robey also claims that the movie encountered unanimous hatred from Britain’s broadsheet critics. James Christopher in The Times found it “shockingly likeable, and I’ve seen and wept through it twice”.

Mr Robey mocked one sentence from my five-star review in the Daily Mail (to which I moved after being film critic for a broadsheet paper, The Sunday Telegraph), where I praised Richard Curtis’s “self-discipline”, but that was exactly the quality needed to compress so many subplots into a coherent movie.

Over-serious critics missed the point then, and they’re still missing it. Too many have poured scorn on Curtis’s films for not being didactic pieces of social realism – something they never set out to be. Love Actually should be judged according to romantic comedy criteria, and with regard to the social mores of its own day, not ours.

The box office returns around the world tell their own story: audiences loved it. If critics can’t understand why, they should be looking at themselves, not at films they choose not to understand.

Christopher Tookey

London N1