Life As We Know It Movie Review – Nothing in the beloved Christmas rom-com looks all that romantic—at least not in a way that doesn’t feel cheap.
Melinda Fakuade is an associate editor for , working primarily with The Goods and the Culture team. Hailing from New York, her writing focuses on culture, entertainment and consumerism.
Life As We Know It Movie Review
I know many of you are probably clinging to your pearls in disbelief. Perhaps you yourself have been excited about this film since its release in November 2003, over 17 years ago. Even after all these years,
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For some, it still reigns supreme as the quintessential Christmas movie. It was praised for its cheesy clichés and general cuteness, handsomely packaged in a rom-com package.
Here’s the gist: the film introduces us to several different couples living out their ideas of “love” in the weeks leading up to Christmas. In the name of love, they take risks, suffer heartache, isolate themselves, surround themselves with friends and family, and pursue love, all in the name of the holidays. Every relationship is designed as a way to make a statement about the nature of love. The characters are imperfect, and maybe that’s what the film is trying to say about love, but it also fails to articulate it clearly. Some relationships seem weak; others are so underdeveloped that they don’t give me a chance to feel anything. Nothing about the film looks all that romantic — at least not in a way that doesn’t feel cheap.
I know this is the type of opinion that makes people salivate at the chance to send hate mail. But in the spirit of Christmas, please be kind enough to let me defend it
This is where it’s set: Christmastime in England, with an all-star cast that does very little to impress. There are nine of them — nine! — main stories and each tries to portray a love story. But the English accents, the holiday season, and the stars barely pretending to be regular people feel like a failed movie insurance policy. The combination of all these pieces is an insult to the viewer’s imagination. Writer-director Richard Curtis certainly seems to be thinking, as the film drags itself deeper and deeper into the boring hole, that it will be a success. I’ve put all of British Hollywood on a supposed “rom-com” that’s grasping at straws when it comes to romance and comedy, but hey, they’ll love it – it’s Christmas time, after all.
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His obsession with Christmas is one of his main problems. It has nothing to do with Christmas other than its background, but it does try to promote the juvenile but enduring idea that Christmas is inherently romantic. I don’t know why this opinion is so popular. Does a budding relationship need a snowy landscape, gingerbread houses and hiding relatives to spark intimacy? Do couples automatically yearn for each other just because Santa is on his way? In a movie where the characters and their relationships are so weak, perhaps the upcoming Kris Kringle is a powerful enough aphrodisiac in itself.
The stellar cast only accentuates the two-dimensionality of these characters. Liam Neeson plays a grieving father who is too invested in his son’s love life. Cute, I mean, but Neeson’s character spends the movie acting like his son’s crush is in a life-or-death situation. (
Franchise, though clearly inspired by Neeson’s overprotective father role, doesn’t begin for another five years.) Keira Knightley stars as a newlywed who serves the plot only as a cardboard figure for Andrew Lincoln’s character, on whom she projects a creepy crush. Denise Richards last minute cameo? Sure, why not! Rowan Atkinson as the enthusiastic clerk at the jewelery counter isn’t pleasant, he’s alarming – what the hell is Mr Bean doing here?
The endless onslaught of instantly recognizable actors is as mind-boggling as the plot points that twist and weave together without a hint of skill. At the moment when a certain plot seems almost forgotten, the film pulls us back to it and the viewer has to struggle to recall the context. I also kept switching characters – there are so many boring white guys who are all involved in each other’s lives, sometimes without even knowing it. This could be cute and fun if it managed to be coherent. Watching
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It’s like running a marathon and it’s impossible to keep up without proper training, which is why I guess Stans can recite its intricacies so easily. For the rest of us, mental gymnastics leaves the wind.
It fails to give viewers a personal stake in the success of any of its overwrought romantic pairings, which are almost too numerous to count. The film is much more concerned with piecing together as many stories as possible rather than developing the people or their plots.
Let’s take a brief look at the main characters, for those who haven’t seen the movie yet. Spoiler: Almost all of them are terrible.
There is Daniel (Liam Neeson) and his son Sam (Thomas Sangster), who is “in love” with a classmate, and that’s why he was sad. It’s not entirely unrelated to his mother’s recent death, though somehow the girl of his dreams has the same name as his mother, Joanna. Uh, weird, but okay! Daniel helps his son go so far as to stalk his classmate to the airport, telling the attendant that the kid needs to get in without a boarding pass to “say goodbye to the love of his life.” Are we just going to pretend that this is normal or healthy, even for the realm of pretend romance movies? And yet,
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He wants us to root for father and son, to accept and encourage this almost criminal behavior, no matter how poor it might make Joanna feel.
Juliet (Keira Knightley) is at the center of a love triangle between her, her husband Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his best man Mark (Andrew Lincoln). That is, if you can even call it a love triangle, because Peter doesn’t even realize that his best friend is “in love” with his new bride, despite never having spoken more than a few words to her in his life. A true love triangle usually involves some form of awareness by all parties involved, but oh well! In arguably the film’s most iconic scene, Mark suddenly shows up at Juliet’s house and hangs up some strange signs proclaiming his love. Although he waits until Julia and Peter’s wedding to express his feelings, we, the viewers, are supposed to find the confession and subsequent kiss worthy of our adoration.
With whom he is trying to get close, a woman he knows nothing about. There’s no build-up – we just have to agree that Mark has a very common obsession with Juliet, and that obsession is an extreme “love”. Peter never learns of the beginnings of this emotional affair, leaving the future of his marriage in doubt.
Other couples vary in how obnoxious they are. The Good: Jamie (Colin Firth) and Aurélia (Lúcia Moniz) fall for each other in typical but believable romantic comedy fashion. Neither speaks the other’s language, but the attraction is there, born of an intangible love. The same goes for a pair of pornographic doubles, John and Judy, played by Martin Freeman and Joanna Page respectively. But these couples deserve big stories, real arcs that can’t be found within the confines of this movie.
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Then the bad: co-workers Karl and Sarah (Rodrigo Santoro and Laura Linney), who basically just hook up and nothing more. Nothing comes of Sarah’s responsibility with her mentally ill brother, but it’s a ridiculously shallow plot that only leaves us with more questions, so the couple might as well have been cut from the movie. Perhaps the budding romance between the Prime Minister, charmingly played by Hugh Grant, and his employee Natalie (Martine McCutcheon) might have worked better elsewhere, but it certainly doesn’t here. What gives the prime minister the final courage to pursue Natalie is watching her be sexually harassed by the President of the United States, played by Billy Bob Thornton. For some reason, the event provokes a strange jealousy in the premiere, but the film treats it as heartbreak. Natalie and the Prime Minister are clearly attracted to each other, but it’s not until the end of their arc, motivated by a desire to stick with POTUS, and of course, the spirit of Christmas.
Their romance is just as wildly inappropriate as the relationship between Harry (Alan Rickman) and Mia (Heike Makatsch), the boss and his assistant. To make matters worse, Harry is married. He and Mia make eye contact from the start of their interactions, but it’s never made clear in the film whether or not they’re sleeping together. Mia inexplicably wears blinded devil ears at the holiday party. we understand
She is a temptress, and he is an idiot who wants to “dance with the devil” in front of his eyes.
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