Love Actually is an intentionally overstuffed fruitcake of a holiday movie… but it makes no apologies. It’s as if director Richard Curtis took every cliched romantic comedy and holiday heart-warmer, diced them up and threw them together into one movie. Honestly, as a cynical post-modern cinephile, I don’t feel good about admitting how much I liked this movie. But, I will confess… despite an otherwise horrible movie-going experience Love Actually won me over.

Love Actually is not really a traditional story, but more of a theme piece about love. The film opens with documentary style footage of tearful greetings of family and friends at London’s Heathrow Airport. Hugh Grant describes the theme of he piece with a short snippet of narration: “General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. Seems to me that love actually is everywhere.” That sets the tone of the rest of the movie, over the course of which, writer/director Richard Curtis is earnestly determined to show us that Love IS EVERYWHERE.

Love Actually marks Curtis’ directorial debut, and while the film is hardly ground-breaking cinema, you have to give him credit for juggling dozens of characters and story lines in a manner that keeps everything clear. If you thought Once Upon a Time in Mexico had a lot going on, get ready for this: 

* An aging rock star (Bill Nighy) stages a comeback with a Christmas song he gladly admits is terrible.
* A recently widowed father (Liam Neeson) tries to bond with his son by helping him hook up with a cute american girl.
* Two movie stand-ins fall in love while naked and striking sexual poses for a camera crew.
* A new bride (Keira Knightly) discovers her husband’s best friend is in love with her.
* A novelist (Colin Firth) flees to France after a bad breakup and falls for his non-English speaking maid.
* A waiter is convinced his luck with girls will change if he can just get to America.
* A bachelor prime minister (Hugh Grant) falls for a chubby and foul-mouthed staff member.
* The prime minister’s sister (Emma Thompson) is worried about her husband (Alan Rickman)...
* ... who is struggling to resist the seduction of his hot secretary, while at the same time encouraging his star employee (Laura Linney)...
* ... to hook up with a fellow employee but instead of hanging out with her retarded brother all the time.

Sandwiched between these story lines are a few other subplots I have probably forgotten to mention. None of these story lines are in the least bit original on engaging on their own, but by throwing them all together they gain strength and resonance that they would otherwise lack. Curtis is also smart enough to know that he is working with some cliched material here, and he uses sharp humor to spin the scenes into unexpected directions. Curtis’ master stroke is setting the film over the last few days leading up to Christmas. Just by nature of it being a Christmas movie, the sentimentality is much easier to swallow.

And just like a Christmas movie should be, the film is overloaded with everything, including cast members. This many recognizable faces is usually the sign of a bad movie, but here it is necessary. There are so many characters in this film, audiences would be completely lost if the faces weren’t somewhat familiar. The performances themselves are effective, but nothing ground-breaking.

The break-out character of the film is Billy Mack (Bill Nighy), a crotchety rock star is competing with a pretty boy band to have the years #1 Christmas song—a cover of “Love is All Around” re-titled “Christmas is All-Around.” Billy Mack knows the song is terrible and he knows he is washed-up. Every time the movie has tugged on the heartstrings for a little too long, Curtis brings Mack back on screen to put things in perspective.

The film moves along at a brisk pace and gradually the loosely linked storylines come together bringing all the characters to a childrens Christmas concert. You can’t really go wrong with cute kids dressed as lobsters and other creatures totally out of place at a nativity play. Keeping his female audience members needs in mind, Curtis even throws in a couple of additional climaxes, just in case your heart-strings haven’t been tugged on enough.

By the end of the film, all the characters have been brought together and everything has been neatly and wrapped up. Sure, the film may be simplistic and corn-ball, but that may actually be the point. The film is so cheerful and optimistic, that you won’t find yourself worrying about the movie’s plot holes until the next day or so. And in the end, it doesn’t really matter.

As the credits begin to roll and the Beach Boys’ being to sing “God Only knows” over more footage of family and friends re-uniting… all but the most hard-hearted will have to admit that Curtis has made his point. Love IS all around us.