Actually, there is a level on which Richard Curtis's feature directing debut is quite awful. It's that superficial level of cinema where the little things play -- little things like direction, photography, pacing, character development, editing and often performance.

Curtis doesn't need those details because he possesses a peculiar alternative to true talent: He has the ability to spin tripe into gold. What many writers and directors have to work for, have to earn, Curtis finds despite himself. As much as I sat rolling my eyes and scratching my head over Love Actually, I kept finding myself laughing out loud and grinning from ear to ear. And what's worse is that at the time, I only periodically felt guilty about my amusement.

It's my suspicion that many viewers will feel even less guilt than I did in their pleasure and that they'll spend much less time agonizing over the film's myriad failures. It all adds up to a strange recommendation from me. I feel a little bit like the kid in the schoolyard who says, "Ewww, this is gross. Try it."

Basically, the centerpiece of my recommendation goes like this: If you're the type person who is susceptible to romantic comedies of this ilk, this film will probably make you plenty happy. If you're the type cynical person who scoffs at romantic comedies and is hard-hearted to the appeals of holiday films, steer clear, for the love of G-d.

Luigi Pirandello wrote a 1921 play whose title is roughly Six Characters in Search of an Author. Richard Curtis has taken that relatively restrained Theatre of the Absurd concept and inadvertently multiplied it by a factor of three or four. Love Actually is something akin to Thirty or Forty Characters in Search of a Movie. Over the span of more than 125, an epic length for a rom-com, Curtis spins out a seemingly endless number of stories. Sitting here without using the Internet Movie Database for confirmation, I've got at least eight different unconnected stories, though each of the stories seems to have at least one subplot and several of them intersect.

In his absurdly generous review of the film, Roger Ebert observes that he "could attempt to summarize the dozen (or so) love stories, but that way madness lies." I love Ebert, but he's a wimp.

All you need to know about the various stories is that the film's title comes from an introductory quote that reads "Love actually is all around." Fair 'nuf.

The film begins with the arrival gates at Heathrow, where dozens of normal looking people (the last unattractive people to appear in the movie before the closing credits) greet each other with love.

The various stories (without giving away any romantic twists):

The new Prime Minister of England (Hugh Grant, naturally) arrives at 10 Downing Street and instantly is smitten by Natalie (Martine McCutcheon), a member of his wait-staff. He's also got credibility issues that can only be solved by standing up to the President of the United States (Billy Bob Thornton in an unnecessary cameo).

The Prime Minister's sister Karen (Emma Thompson) is nervous that her husband Harry (Alan Rickman) is having impure thoughts regarding his secretary (Heike Makatsch).

There's recently widowed Daniel (Liam Neeson) and his young stepson Sam (Thomas Sanger). Sam is in love with an unobtainable American girl and Daniel just wants to help. It would feel exactly like About a Boy except that there's a twist. Oh, bollocks. There's no twist. It's exactly like About a Boy except that Hugh Grant is playing a different part.

There's Laura Linney's Sarah, who works for Harry and is secretly pining away for enigmatic (read: dull, but foreign) designer Karl (Rodrigo Santoro). But why does Sarah's cell phone keep going off at inopportune moments?

There's the lovely Julie (Keira Knightley) who recently married Peter (the woefully irrelevant Chiwetel Ejiofor) and can't understand why Peter's best friend Mark (Andrew Lincoln) doesn't seem to like her.

There's Colin (Kris Marshall), an annoying young man who goes off to the United States to find easy sex.

There are two people (Joanna Page and Martin Freeman) who strike up an uncertain romance while either doing porn or body-double work or stand-in duty or something.

There's cuckolded Jamie (Colin Firth) who becomes attracted to his Portuguese maid Aurelia (Lucia Moniz), even though she doesn't speak a word of English.

In the background, there's always the once-famous rock star Billy Mack (Bill Nighy) who is trolling the television and radio waves hoping for a comeback with the hideous holiday cover "Christmas is All Around."

Mack would be the glue that sticks all of these stories together, except that he has maybe 15 minutes of screentime (probably less) and this movie needs a heck of a lot more glue than that. I've read several references to how Bill Nighy steals every scene he's in, or that he steals the movie. I'm not sure about the appropriateness of the verb "steal" given that Nighy's character is far and away the most colorful in the film and that he has roughly the same amount of time on screen as any of the other actors. He doesn't steal anything so much as, in the balance of things, he makes the biggest impression.

Who, you might logically wonder, is the star of Love Actually? Well, that's going to depend on which of the film's actors you like the most, because none of the stories stands out for its originality or flair.

The stories touch on different aspects of love: There's platonic love and unspoken love and sexual love and pure love and boring love and intolerably boring love and predictable love and several different forms of love with your subordinates. Oh yes, love actually is all around. Yup. There's just a bit two-hour-plus blob of amorphous, unfocused, contrived love.

I've also heard several people say that there are too many stories and that they wished they could have spent more time with some of their favorites, that each of the individual vignettes could have sustained an entire film to itself.

I disagree vehemently. I got no indication that any specific character was anything more complicated or interesting than the half-hearted domino run that makes up their own little story. While several of the stories were cute and slight enough on their own, none seemed capable of being the center of an expanded universe.

My logic is simple: Richard Curtis makes a lot of money to write movies. If any one of these stories had possessed the necessary depth to become a movie, do you think he would have squished a dozen little stories together or do you think he would have written three or four or twelve individual scripts? Love Actually is an assemblage of half-baked short stories and rarely feels like anything else.

The stories all begin with five weeks to go before Christmas, which helps establish an artificial five-act structure. What's problematic is that some of the individual stories end up wildly accelerated (there's no logic by which the Firth story works in five weeks), while others probably would only take one day to resolve and yet are stretched out over a much longer period (are the two body doubles on the longest porn shoot in history? Yes, yes they are). There are endless contrived obstacles to stretch different stories out (the lovely Juliet takes a leisurely honeymoon to make her simple story seem longer and there's no reason why Colin's plane ticket to the States has to be in three weeks except to allow the story to go into another act).

Because the stories are all on different tracks, they reach different emotional peaks at different times, which is OK unless the resolutions are too simple and too short. Laura Linney's thread, for example, ended well before anything worthwhile happened and thus was perhaps the only story I wanted to see more of. The marginally open-endedness of the different arcs doesn't bother me so much as I was frustrated by the lack of writerly or directorial control. I never felt like Richard Curtis was engineering the various stories to build to a climax, only that he set different cars on different tracks and let them finish whenever they wanted to. Rather than exercising authorial power, he practices benign neglect.

What's odd, or uncomfortable, is that while the film as a whole seems to meander and lurch along of its own volition, Curtis seems incapable of allowing individual scenes to do the same. I don't want to see the movie again, but if I did, I'd want to count how many scenes are shoved along by the film's overbearing soundtrack of predictable love and holiday related tunes. Curtis doesn't miss an obvious song and from what I can tell, his trademark as a director is that he really likes musical montages and music video-style moments of people walking and running through London with a silly carol or pop song in the background. He doesn't have an ounce of faith in the stories and their ability to maintain emotional pitch, so he infantilizes the cinema process. There isn't a single millisecond of Love Actually in which Richard Curtis isn't telling you what to feel.

As a writer, Curtis is something of a legend for his ability to transform high concept romantic comedies into light gems. From Four Weddings and a Funeral to Notting Hill to Bridget Jones' Diary, Curtis has used a genuine gift with language to disarm the most cliched of love stories (generally with the help of Hugh Grant, apparently). His power as a writer is so great that he now has contractual final cut on anything he writes. Realizing that that might alienate most directors, Curtis took the helm of Love Actually, a film that should make viewers appreciate the grace that Mike Newell, Roger Michell and Sharon Maguire brought to the table in directing Curtis' earlier feature scripts.

For a film that aspires to nothing less than capturing the pure magic of Love, Christmas and London, Love Actually doesn't possess an iota of visual poetry. There's a sterility to Michael Coulter's cinematography that's just baffling considering the subject matter. Working with these actors and that city, I give Coulter no points for making Keira Knightley look lovely or St. Paul's look magisterial from across the Thames. The film's structure and narrative are such romantic bullplop that the semi-realistic photographic approach feels like a betrayal. A hyper-romantic movie requires hyper-romantic visuals, not the casual acceptance that simply of its own merits, London is hyper-romantic (it's my favorite city in the entire world, but when it comes to romance, you can't take it at its word as you could with, say, Paris).

It's an over-polished London stripped of much of the city's natural texture and its natural diversity. These characters are all upper middle class and they all have random jobs that involve computers or typewriters. Nobody is actually defined by their professions either because as we know from seeing enough Richard Curtis films, his characters all talk exactly the same. Fortunately, that means that they're all smart and witty, but unfortunately it makes that there's no such thing as individual voices or really individual characters.

Beyond the already discussed Nighy, who is a total hoot, it's tough to know which of the actors is able to stand out. As one of the best working actors on this little blue-green planet, Emma Thompson is devastatingly funny and good making a silk purse of a sow's ear, as they say. Similarly, Laura Linney's magnificent blend of humorous sparkle and secretive sadness raise the oft-asked question of why writers aren't bending over backwards to writer her better parts.

Nobody understands Richard Curtis's dialogue like Hugh Grant, which makes it sad when the script stabs him in the back in the middle (Grant's scenes with Thornton couldn't be worse written and his speech standing up to the President is a farce). Mostly, though, Grant is in his element here, enough so that you ignore the inherent silliness of casting him as Prime Minister. He also has a lovely foil in McCutcheon, who you probably won't recognize unless you're a big fan of EastEnders. McCutcheon is so lovely and so captivating that you wish Curtis weren't quite so obsessed with making jokes about her weight. The point of the barbs is, I guess, that it would be ridiculous to think that this woman is fat, but after 20 "chubby" jokes, it becomes self-fulfilling.

As the preternaturally mature Sam, Thomas Sanger is obviously favored by Curtis, who gives his scenes a prominence that they really don't deserve. Sanger is great and he would have seemed even better if he didn't weren't auditioning for a remake of About a Boy. Opposite Liam Neeson's blandest performance, this is the rare instance of a child star being let down by the professionals around him.

The camera also continues to adore Knightley, who in her third film of the year continues to prove that she's beautiful, but hardly an actress (yet, since she's young). One of the film's important moments is a revelation she gets while watching a videotape. I kept examining her face waiting for the necessarily light to go off, but it never did. She's a ravishing blank slate.

More appealing to me was Elisha Cuthbert who has three minutes of screentime and manages to hold the screen admirably. Or else I just like looking at her. I'm not sure which.

Rickman and Ejiofor are wasted and Firth is entirely unnecessary.

But I laughed. At the end of the day, that's what pushed me over the edge to the slimmest of recommendation. I laughed at the Nativity lobster and at so-so jokes involving Portuguese subtitles and at Hugh Grant dancing through the Prime Minster's home. I loved at McCutcheon's inappropriate potty mouth and at every thing Nighy did.

Yeah, Love Actually is a big mess. No, it's not a good movie. Yes, I'm only giving it 2.5 stars out of 5, but if you want to see it and you want to enjoy it, I promise I won't insult you too much.

[My apologies if this review is a little rushed a sloppy. So was the movie, darnit...]





Recommended: Yes