Arizona Herald – Online Newspaper serving the state of Arizona

Notting Hill [DVD]

Screenplay : Richard Curtis

MPAA Rating : PG-13

Year of Release : 1999

Stars : Julia Roberts (Anna Scott), Hugh Grant (William Thacker), Hugh Bonneville (Bernie), Emma Chambers (Honey), James Dreyfus (Martin), Rhys Ifans (Spike), Tim McInnerny (Max), Gina McKee (Bella), Richard McCabe (Tony)

Notting Hill is about a mere mortal who falls in love with a goddess. Well, not quite a "goddess," but the closest thing we have these days: a $15-million-a-picture movie star. And what happens when mortals get involved with the gods? As one character puts it not-so-lightly, "Buggered. Every time."

The mortal in question is William Thacker (Hugh Grant), a quiet chap who lives in Notting Hill, a small, ethnically diverse and very hip corner of West London. He owns a small travel bookshop and hasn't been too successful in life. His wife left him for someone who looks like Harrison Ford, and he doesn't sell many books--apparently there aren't many people in Notting Hill looking for travel books about Turkey.

The goddess is Anna Scott, played in a bit of inspired casting by Julia Roberts (actually, the part was written with her in mind). It's a strange situation where film meets reality because, after all, Julia Roberts is undoubtedly one of the most famous and revered movie actresses of the last decade. Her face and her smile are known throughout the world, and there is something of an interesting subtext where it's easy to imagine she's not so much playing Anna Scott, as Anna Scott is a reflection of Julia Roberts. It makes the character more personal and also more sympathetic, which helps the movie get over its major hurdle, namely convincing its audience to care and eventually feel sorry for a physically flawless woman who makes $15 million for six weeks of work and is loved and adored by millions.

Anna and William meet in a series of small coincidences around his bookshop, and eventually their relationship moves from being movie star and admirer, to being friends, to being romantically involved. Her life is too complicated and his is too simple, and it's easy to see why they would love each other. She offers him a bit of excitement to rip him from his hum-drum existence, and he offers her blessed normalcy. Roberts does an excellent job of conveying a woman who would love to simply sit down and have a bad meal with William's oddball family of English eccentrics just because it's what normal people do (the fact that William's family is anything but "normal" is an irony not completely lost).

Notting Hill was written by Richard Curtis, who also wrote Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), the movie that made Hugh Grant an international star seven years ago. Curtis shows the same affinity for offbeat English characters as he did in Four Weddings, none so scene-stealing as William's offish flatmate, Spike (Rhys Ifans), a grungy, uncombed, scrawny Welshman who seems to have no job and no sense of simple hygiene and is indifferent to his permanent case of bedhead. How and why William and Spike ended up living together is never quite explained, but his role in the movie is simple and straightforward: to play the sloppy Oscar to Hugh Grant's reserved Felix. Many of their scenes together are quite funny, and Ifans manages to keep Spike just human enough so that he doesn't get tiresome or irritating as a character.

The movie tends to run somewhat long, and this is partly due to the script. While most romantic storylines have one major plot point that cause the leads to be temporarily separated from each other and create a dilemma that must be solved by the movie's conclusion, Curtis gives us no less than three. All of them are certainly believable, but it sometimes feels like one crisis too many. Old boyfriends, invading paparazzi, overheard comments, reservation about their potential together--all of these are obstacles that get in the way and have to be overcome.

Curtis and director Roger Michell also have the tendency to hold jokes too long. In one scene, William visits Anna at her hotel and finds himself caught in the middle of a press junket for her movie. Pretending to be a journalist from Horse and Hound (he sees the magazine sitting on a table when asked what publication he writes for), William is forced to come up with questions for Anna as if he were a magazine writer. "So ... are there any horses in the movie?" he stutters. "No, since it's set in space," she replies. This scene is quite hilarious in that befuddled, Hugh Grant kind of way, but it keeps going as William is taken around by Anna's publicist to interview each and every actor in the movie. By the third one, his questioning becomes a bit repetitive and the joke loses its steam.

However, Notting Hill is primarily a fairy-tale romance, a fantasy about the free nature of love where anyone can fall in love with anyone else, and in this area it succeeds beautifully. The movie has a basic sweetness that is undeniable--it truly cares for its characters and wants to see them happy in the end. There's not a cynical bone to be found. And, while the conclusion is a somewhat questionable and all-too-conventional wrap-up, it still feels rewarding because the characters have truly been brought to life and we want to see them live happily ever after, no matter what that entails.

The movie's lynchpin is the performance by Julia Roberts, who endows Anna Scott with an underlying sadness that is finally unearthed from beneath her movie star glitz. It's easy to be cynical and think, "Oh, poor movie star, boo-hoo," but Roberts' performance takes us past that to the human Anna, who doesn't really care about money or fame and is tired of having her life scheduled by a publicist. Roberts uses her internationally renowned multi-million-dollar smile poignantly, as it often comes out, tentative and hesitant, in the moments that she is most trying to hide her pain or fear. It gives us the impression that she's used that smile so much in movies and on red carpets that it's almost like learning to walk to use it to express actual emotions in ordinary circumstances. Part of the fairy tale is that William, the mortal, helps Anna not only become, but also desire to be, mortal, as well.

Hugh Grant doesn't stretch his acting chops much; in fact, he basically replays his rumbled every-Brit role from Four Weddings. Still, what better character is there to set in a fantasy where a regular bloke becomes involved with the most famous woman in the world? Grant's stuttering charm and shy sensibilities are exactly what would attract a woman like Anna, who is sick of self-obsessed movie star boyfriends who abuse and neglect her. Sometimes, the movie says in its naive but wonderfully affable manner, gods need mortals.