Recipe for joy: Love, actually
The world cleaves into two camps: people who love Love Actually and people who have no souls. The 2003 movie is one of those sprawling British films that drags out all the popular U.K. actors of the day and stirs them into an ensemble cast: Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Keira Knightley, Colin Firth (who, I am told, will be my wife’s second husband), Bill Nighy, Liam Neeson …
Portugal’s ineffably lovely Lucia Moniz (my second wife, after the first one dumps me for Colin) is in the film. So are a sprinkling of American actors, including Billy Bob Thornton, added to give the show A) U.S. box office appeal and B) a villain for British audiences to boo. Elisha Cuthbert (who, BTW, gave birth this week; congrats to Elisha and her husband Dion Phaneuf of the Ottawa Senators) is the lone Canadian, though the rest of the world will assume she’s American, anyway.
Mostly, though, Love Actually is a British affair, weaving together 10 story lines to examine love in all its forms: romantic, platonic, filial, unrequited … It’s a heartstring-tugger of the first order — though those grinches with no heartstrings to tug dismiss the film sneeringly, even angrily, as saccharine, mawkish and distressingly devoid of gunfire. (Pretty strong emotions for people who are totally dead inside.)
To these sourpusses I can only argue: The airport scene.
“Whenever I get gloomy about the state of the world, I think of the arrivals gate at Heathrow airport,” intones Grant’s voice over footage of the real-life, unabashedly joyful reunions of passengers and their loved ones. “Fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends …”
The scene at Victoria International is no different at Christmas, it’s just on a smaller scale. This is the weekend to see it, too, the airport packed with Islanders eagerly awaiting boyfriends home from the oilpatch, daughters back from university, foreign relatives tiptoeing into Canada as gingerly as a cat on new snow.
Everybody in the arrivals area has a story: Nikki Metcalf, dressed in a festive red top, was waiting for the air force husband who has been gone for four months. He’ll be gone for another five after this two-week break, too. They’ve only been married a year and a half.
Barry and Linda Putz moved to Victoria from Regina 18 months ago, but really miss their son Jeremy, a baker back in Saskatchewan. They donned Santa hats for his arrival.
Chris Ng, his two pre-schoolers swirling around his ankles, stood with parents who were visiting from the Prairies, all of them waiting for brother Gary to join them from Alberta. “It’s the first year that all of us have been together.”
Isabelle Guyon, Adam Dewolfe and their daughter Lou Dewolfe were hard to miss, holding hand-lettered signs and decked out in reindeer antlers, musical tuques and Christmas sweaters with flashing lights while waiting for Isabelle’s sister and niece to fly in from Montreal.
At 10 a.m., Christina Hantel-Fraser and husband Derek, having taken root in North Saanich after a lifetime in the diplomatic service, stood right at the rail, eager for the sliding doors to reveal daughter Julia, her husband and their three- and five-year-olds, arriving from Kelowna.
“There’s a big boy,” said Derek as the younger one leapt into his arms. They planned to be back at 10 p.m. as another daughter, a London banker, arrived from England.
On and on it went. A lot of white-haired people were there to meet grey-haired ones. Some people greeted each other with perfunctory hugs, while others clung on like they would never let go. One couple looked as though they might need to stop and get a hotel room on the way home from the airport.
A fast-growing nephew willed himself up as he went back-toback with an uncle to see who was taller. When near-identical sisters flew into an embrace, it looked like a young woman running into a mirror. A little girl in pigtails and pink tights launched herself into her grandfather with the force of a linebacker; like George Chuvalo fighting Muhammad Ali, his knees buckled but he wouldn’t go down, and the smile never left his face.
Forget the gifts and the turkey and the lights and the stress — this was Christmas.
As they departed the arrivals area, Jeremy Putz slipped his arm around his mother’s shoulders and she wrapped hers around his back.
Nikki Metcalf and her husband left hand-in-hand.