I'm planning to focus on different Christmas movies each day these next two weeks. But as I was writing up LOVE ACTUALLY yesterday I kept coming back to a second technique that film uses that really works for me. It's a really minor element, and one that won't directly apply to a lot of stories. But I do think it's part of why the film continues to be a favorite.
It's the interconnections. Even though LOVE ACTUALLY is the story of a bunch of different London people struggling to overcome their fears and take the risk of loving, those stories themselves are also interconnected. Natalie is in love with David, who is the brother of Karen, who is married to Harry, who is kind of having a thing with Mia, who was hit on by Colin and friends with Mark, who is in love with Juliet, who is married to his best friend Peter, who is somehow friends with Jamie, who is in love with Aurelia.
Some of the characters are more loosely connected: the porn stand-ins John and Judy are mostly a story of their own, except their assistant director is Colin's best friend Tony; but they also run into Tony at the airport at the end, when Colin shows up with a new girlfriend for Tony, and David and Natalie and Harry and Karen and Sam and Joanna also reunite nearby. Likewise, Sarah's story is mostly with Harry, Karl and her brother Michael; but she's also friends with either Peter and Juliet (and perhaps Jamie) as she's at their wedding, and she has a conversation with Mark there that is actually pretty important in his story. And Colin is working at that wedding. Billy Mack interacts directly with no one except Joe; and yet almost every character ends up watching him on television or listening to him on the radio at one point or another.
Once you've seen the film a couple times, the very fact that you're going to see different characters interact for a moment here or there becomes a new part of the fun of it all, something you look forward to. And writer Richard Curtis also makes some of the connections harder to figure out, which means there's still fun work to be done in later viewings. Like, What is the deal with Jamie? Who from the wedding is he friends with? Also, is Karen just a friend of Daniel's, or is she some kind of blood relation? And how is Daniel or his wife related to Natalie's parents, because I'm pretty sure they are present at the funeral?
The movie never answers some of these questions. That might drive some people nuts, but it also invites us to be creative, to take things further ourselves.
This technique, which I call Minding (or Mining) the Gap, is something I've written about here before. When you build a gap into a story, you create the possibility of engaging the audience further, giving them a different kind of ownership of what they're watching.
But I think the thing worth noting here is not that technique per se, but Curtis' broader decision to add another layer to the story, one that in some sense is unnecessary and kind of decorative. It may have been the first thing he thought of, the hook that got him excited, I don't know. But to me it's just a reminder that even when you think your script is done, it's worth going back one more time and asking yourself, Is there some further layer or touch that I can add to the whole? Something that isn't just an affectation, but speaks to the themes of the piece in a different way?
There's a lot of good movies, a lot of good TV shows. But to my mind the truly great ones are often the ones that go this extra mile, that find one more visual or narrative layer. It's really the definition of craft.
