Watching this Valentine’s Day rerelease of Notting Hill 20 years on is an unexpectedly complicated experience. Kicking off with Elvis Costello’s great cover of Charles Aznavour’s She, it’s a lovely warm-hearted romantic comedy, as well as being an elegant homage to Roman Holiday (complete with the press conference scene at the end) written by Richard Curtis and starring Hugh Grant as shy bookshop owner William and Julia Roberts as Anna, the Hollywood movie star he falls for. This film is still her career best to date, and Notting Hill is incidentally superior to the previous Four Weddings and a Funeral, which some assume to be better because it’s got death and WH Auden and is therefore supposedly more profound. Roberts’s “I’m just a girl” scene, endlessly mocked, is delivered with absolute sincerity and charm. Notting Hill was the first film I ever reviewed and I’m a bit dismayed at my initial, slightly ungenerous response.
It is true that the London Curtis gives us is a bit romanticised – though not as weirdly and unrecognisably artificial as it becomes in Love, Actually and the Bridget Jones films – and the film misses out on the Notting Hill carnival, despite a year-round montage of the Notting Hill streets. In 1999, however, I was ignorant of how very difficult a romcom was to bring off, and how many awful ones I was destined to sit through.
Since its release, we have sadly lost Emma Chambers; she was William’s wacky sister, Honey, who had an uproariously embarrassing crush on Anna, and is destined to find romance with William’s outrageous housemate Spike – the role that made a star of Rhys Ifans. Gina McKee and Tim McInnerny are quietly engaging as William’s old mates, and Hugh Bonneville, in this era before Downton made him a global megstar, is excellent as the dopey Bernie. I still laugh at him timidly saying: “Love your work!” to Anna.
For all its cheesiness, Notting Hill delivers a very great deal of pleasure, and what feels incredible now is the quality of cast in tiny supporting roles: Dylan Moran, James Dreyfus, Henry Goodman, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Clarke Peters, a young Mischa Barton, Emily Mortimer, Samuel West and Sanjeev Bhaskar. Plus there’s a cameo from Alec Baldwin as Julia’s horrible movie-star boyfriend. Omid Djalili has a subliminal appearance as the guy who sells William the fateful orange juice that he spills all over Anna; and Andrew Haigh, director of Weekend and 45 Years, appears in in the final credits as the work experience guy.
The love story between Anna and William still feels bizarrely like something that might actually happen, particularly the farcical scenes at the press junket at the Ritz, where the hapless William has to pretend to be a magazine journalist for Horse & Hound, to provide cover for his being alone with her in a hotel suite. Grant’s performance has a unique kind of pathos, especially as he trails miserably away later from the hotel, having been mistaken by Baldwin for the room service guy, and at another moment when Honey, with horrible insensitivity, gives him the phone number of Anna’s agent as a consolation prize for not having her. Some of the details do seem very credible. Is Curtis alluding to a real event in someone’s life?
The Englishness of this film is what strikes you now: the insouciance, the irony, the emotional reserve, all of it illumined by the American love affair. In an earlier film, The Tall Guy, Curtis created an Anglo-American special relationship between Emma Thompson and Jeff Goldblum, before seeing how it worked better with the woman in the senior partner role. It’s a year-round indulgence, not just for Valentine’s.
•This article was amended on 15 February 2019 to correct the original singer of She.
