NOTHING HILL
BOTTUM, J. & LAST, JONATHAN V.
NOTHING HILL Julia Roberts's Latest is Pretty—and Pretty Empty By J. Bottum & Jonathan V. Last The newly released Netting Hill is as pretty a film as you're ever going to see. The gloss is high,...
...his job is to sit back and wait for Anna...
...The problem, of course, is that no one in movies actually believes it...
...There's a name for this lack of conflict in a script...
...But in the end none of this can fill the absence of conflict in Notting Hill...
...After a cool introduction, William and Anna meet again moments later when he bumps into her on the street, dousing her with orange juice...
...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...
...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...
...the supporting actors superb...
...And though Notting Hill uses brilliantly every possible filmmaking contrivance and trick to create the feeling of an actual story, you'll quietly dismiss the movie somewhere between the theater and the street...
...The gloss is high, the writing skillful, the editing brilliant, the leading actors dazzling, and J. Bottum is Books & Arts editor andJonathan V. Last is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...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...
...But Grant is perfect...
...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...
...A consummate pretty boy, Grant understood from the first day of his career that overly beautiful men are best suited for comedy...
...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...
...have known for years: British actors possess the finest comic sensibility in show business...
...No one could say the plot of Netting Hill is new...
...Someone has to undergo a transformation, or overcome a character flaw, or suffer a hardship...
...Curtis is also smart enough to write generously for the fine character actors who round out the supporting roles...
...For all his faults, Curtis has witty lines to spare...
...Roberts gets acted off the screen (in part simply because her character is written as a two-dimensional, non-descript "Actress...
...that would be social climbing, and in Hollywood egal-itarianism, only social slumming is allowed...
...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...
...it's called "not having a story...
...The story progresses in predictable Cinderella fashion...
...As William's friends, Rhys Ifans, Tim Mclnnerny, Emma Chambers, and Gina McKee display what watchers of such BBC sitcoms as Fawlty Towers and Are You Being Served...
...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...
...That's what a love story is and why we remember them...
...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...
...While filming in the Notting Hill district of London, the famed Anna happens into a small shop specializing in travel books...
...Anna Scott does have some work to do in Not-ting Hill...
...Well, you and Black Beauty...
...Posing as a reporter for the magazine Horse & Hound, William tells Anna "You're our readers' favorite movie 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...
...The movie almost gets away with it, however...
...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 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...
...Again months pass...
...So Roberts's character has to do all the emotional heavy lifting, not to mention the kissing...
...In real life, Netting Hill has just made Roberts the highest-paid actress in movie history—and she clearly deserves every penny of it...
...In Netting Hill Julia Roberts plays superstar actress Anna Scott, whose misadventures in love are the stuff of tabloid legend...
...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 well-phrased and charming self-deprecations...
...He plays William just right, because as written, the character can't be very manly...
...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...
...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...
...Her presence on screen shouts "Star...
Vol. 4 • June 1999 • No. 37
