As someone who’s taken it upon himself to be knowledgable about film, I’ve long been aware that Richard Curtis occupies a high-ranking throne on romcom Olympus – that was a kingdom I felt little impetus to explore. In recent years, as part of my desperate need to be seen as a feminist ally by my peers and colleagues, I’ve been shrugging off my gendered preconceptions and giving love stories a chance; it generally goes well, as I’ve developed a taste for the syrupy brand of escapist comfort they offer. Combine that long-term initiative with this American’s desire to further immerse himself in the culture of his employers across the Atlantic, and a long-overdue viewing of Curtis’s 1999 boy-meets-girl story Notting Hill seemed in order.
Charm is the petrol that fuels the romcom, a genre that hinges entirely on the audience liking the two people on screen enough to want them to have good lives. In that respect, any judgment of the film is in a direct sense a judgment of Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, individually and as a unit. That they can stand up to such scrutiny will surprise none of the $364m-worth of viewers who made the droll tale of a bookish dreamboat’s dalliance with a Hollywood idol a megahit. Both Grant and Roberts project enough natural intellect to sell the witty-to-a-fault banter of Curtis’s script, though the specific nature of their magnetic draw to one another sticks out to a present-day viewer.
There’s something ineffably late-90s about the notion of Roberts and Grant as sex symbols, particularly in a film that so slavishly worships every detail of Roberts’ visage. It’s partially in their looks, very much of the moment – she in olive-shaped sunglasses and midriff-baring tops, he in artfully ruffled shirts – but more in their essences. They share an erudite connection marked by tentativeness and neurosis, all of which estrange them from a present romcom landscape beset by lumpen Nicholas Sparks adaptations, Netflix’s John Hughes bastardisations, and irony-poisoned deconstructions such as Isn’t It Romantic.
Grant in particular scans as a leading-man type permanently suspended in the amber of the Blair years, embodying that era’s British ideal of refined manhood a few years before he’d make the connection to the PM explicit with Love Actually. (In a sense, both films find Grant maintaining the “special relationship” between the UK and US.) As bookshop proprietor William Thacker, he’s sensitive but sturdy, gentle and approachable, yet man enough to stand up to some jerks disrespecting A-lister Anna Scott (Roberts) at a restaurant. He splits the difference between the lovable nebbish – Grant’s signature stammer probably owes more to Woody Allen than he, or anyone, would care to admit – and a modern-day Austen hero, willing to buck society’s standards out of passion.
His 90s-ness is of a piece with an overall dated feel that never hinders the film, instead doubling its transportive power. Audiences in 1999 got whisked away to England and to heart-stopping infatuation, but a viewer today also time travels. Their tentative courtship makes 20 years ago feel remote and accessible, in the same way that something such as Miss Congeniality perceptibly returns its audience to a pre-9/11 paradigm. In the case of Notting Hill, its sense of time predates the overhauling of the romcom-industrial complex. That’s not just in reference to its gender politics that detail a male wish-fulfilment fantasy pairing the world’s most desired, glamorous woman with a regular guy under rather cloudy rationales.
I mean more about the kinds of movies that get made these days. The heart-on-its-sleeve straight-down-the-middle romcom has become an unfashionable rarity, and seeing something as seminal as Notting Hill through fresh eyes makes a person wonder why. Cast good-looking, competent actors, support them with passable one-liners, and the pleasure will come as surely as that from a delicious TV dinner. Curtis, Roberts, and Grant make it all look so easy. How hard could it be?
