The newly released Notting Hill is as pretty a film as you’re ever going to see. The gloss is high, the writing skillful, the editing brilliant, the leading actors dazzling, and the supporting actors superb. The film has so much going for it, in fact, that the only remaining question about it is why you’ll feel a mild urge to wash your hands on your way out of the theater.
In Notting Hill Julia Roberts plays superstar actress Anna Scott, whose misadventures in love are the stuff of tabloid legend. In real life, Notting Hill has just made Roberts the highest-paid actress in movie history — and she clearly deserves every penny of it. Her presence on screen shouts “Star!” at every moment, so loud and convincingly that fledgling director Roger Michell and writer Richard Curtis are able to perform some astonishingly efficient filmmaking, establishing everything the audience needs to know about the movie-actress life of the Anna Scott character before the credits are finished.
No one could say the plot of Notting Hill is new. While filming in the Notting Hill district of London, the famed Anna happens into a small shop specializing in travel books. The beautiful English actor Hugh Grant, mumbling well-phrased and charming self-deprecations, plays the bookstore’s proprietor, William Thacker, a beautiful Englishman who mumbles wellphrased and charming self-deprecations. After a cool introduction, William and Anna meet again moments later when he bumps into her on the street, dousing her with orange juice. They repair to his flat so that she can clean herself up — and the American actress suddenly kisses him, for no particular reason except that he’s so beautiful and English and mumblingly self-deprecating.
The story progresses in predictable Cinderella fashion. Anna charms William’s extended family with her down-to-earthness, but the cruel fates that strive to keep true lovers apart intervene: Anna’s Hollywood boyfriend suddenly flies in from America, ending their brief courtship. Months pass before Anna gets back in touch with William — and again they are driven apart, this time by the evil press photographers and paparazzi. Again months pass; six months, in fact, conveyed in a five-minute scene of William strolling through snow and sun — a scene so skillfully constructed and beautifully photographed the viewer almost succeeds in forgetting how manipulative it is. But the lovers are at last united against all odds at Anna’s final press conference in England, and, sad to say, they marry, have children, and live happily ever after.
But there’s another sense in which the plot of Notting Hill is entirely new. As a genre, the stagedoor romantic comedy has been around for years, and it always relied on the convention that there’s a dreadful price to pay for fame: Being a celebrity is a hard, unrewarding job involving countless sacrifices of self.
The problem, of course, is that no one in movies actually believes it. Anna Scott does have some work to do in Notting Hill. As a girl-meets-boy inversion of Cinderella, the film is forced to put all the romantic initiative on Julia Roberts’s big shoulders: William can’t make a play for her; that would be social climbing, and in Hollywood egalitarianism, only social slumming is allowed. So Roberts’s character has to do all the emotional heavy lifting, not to mention the kissing.
But apart from the difficult task of convincing some poor bookstore owner to love the most beautiful, wealthy, famous actress in the world, Anna doesn’t really have a lot to do in the film. She doesn’t undergo any reformation or endure any sacrifices, and in the end she gets it all: the love, the boy, the baby, and the fame to boot. There’s a name for this lack of conflict in a script; it’s called “not having a story.”
The movie almost gets away with it, however. Roberts gets acted off the screen (in part simply because her character is written as a two-dimensional, non-descript “Actress”). But Grant is perfect. A consummate pretty boy, Grant understood from the first day of his career that overly beautiful men are best suited for comedy. He plays William just right, because as written, the character can’t be very manly; his job is to sit back and wait for Anna.
Screenwriter Curtis got his start with the hilarious and bilious BBC television series Blackadder and made the move to films with the 1994 Four Weddings and a Funeral. For all his faults, Curtis has witty lines to spare. Posing as a reporter for the magazine Horse & Hound, William tells Anna “You’re our readers’ favorite movie star. Well, you and Black Beauty.” Curtis is also smart enough to write generously for the fine character actors who round out the supporting roles. As William’s friends, Rhys Ifans, Tim McInnerny, Emma Chambers, and Gina McKee display what watchers of such BBC sitcoms as Fawlty Towers and Are You Being Served? have known for years: British actors possess the finest comic sensibility in show business.
But in the end none of this can fill the absence of conflict in Notting Hill. At the heart of even the most middling romantic comedies like Sabrina or Pretty Woman, there has to be something that keeps the lovers apart. Someone has to undergo a transformation, or overcome a character flaw, or suffer a hardship. That’s what a love story is and why we remember them. And though Notting Hill uses brilliantly every possible film-making contrivance and trick to create the feeling of an actual story, you’ll quietly dismiss the movie somewhere between the theater and the street.
