If you have children then it’s almost inevitable that one day you’ll find yourself sitting across from one of them, being told all the ways in which you got it wrong. It’s a bit of a rite of passage. For most of us, these discussions happen over Christmas lunch, or a Ruby Wedding Anniversary buffet, but for Richard Curtis, screenwriter and director extraordinaire, this happened over the weekend at the Cheltenham Literary Festival, where his daughter, the activist and writer Scarlett Curtis, took him to task over the allegations that his films are sexist, racist, and body-shaming.
Scarlett said: ‘“As your daughter, I can confirm that you’re a wonderful man, and I like to think I’ve taught you a lot about feminism. So this is by no means the moment I cancel my dad live on stage. But in the last few years, there has been a growing criticism from a lot of people about the ways your film[s] in particular treated women and people of colour.
“Just to name a few of my faves: ‘tree trunk thighs’; Bridget [Jones] being overweight when she’s just a very skinny white woman; multiple counts of inappropriate male behaviour in Love, Actually, including the actual prime minister; a general feeling that women are visions of unattainable loveliness; and the noticeable lack of people of colour in a film called Notting Hill, which was quite literally one of the birthplaces of the British black civil rights movement.”
I should be very clear here: Scarlett has a point. Her dad’s films do have some flaws to them. Love, Actually has a running joke that Martine McCutcheon’s character is fat, which is basically gaslighting. Bridget Jones arguably had body dysmorphia and an eating disorder. More than one of his films has an entirely white cast. In terms of diversity and inclusion, they don’t nail it.
But much as I hate to say this, I’m not sure that hand-wringing and mea culpas really earn their place in the discussion about his films. These are lovely, happy, romantic, genuinely funny romcoms that aren’t PC but do capture the reality of human behaviour. I also wonder if this discussion might speak to a slightly worrying inability to separate presenting something on screen and condoning it.
In Love, Actually, there’s a bit where Natalie (Martine McCucheon) says that her boyfriend broke up with her because she’s put on weight, telling her “no one’s going to fancy a girl with thighs like big tree trunks”. Obviously horrible, but surely that’s really a line about what a bastard her ex-boyfriend is, and the joke is that she’s a beautiful woman with a horrible ex? These are the kinds of things people actually think, feel and say. They might not be ‘right’, but they are true, and it’s the grasp of the truth in these films that make them genuinely romantic and genuinely funny.
Similarly, Bridget Jones writes down everything she eats, obsesses about her weight and constantly calls herself fat, while being objectively thin (about nine and a half stone). This isn’t Helen Fielding or Richard Curtis claiming that Bridget is fat: it’s a commentary about the bonkers, obsessive relationship between Bridget and her weight. She was in her early 30s at a time when Special K wanted you to live off mostly cereal. It’s real, and honest, and genuine for her to have wildly warped concepts about bodies, and representing that on film doesn’t have to be a gritty miserable Ken Loach hoopla. Just because it’s presented as funny doesn’t mean it can’t also be moving and meaningful.
For every teeth-aching moment in a Richard Curtis film where you wonder how London could be so white, there’s a genuinely brilliant, progressive moment. Four Weddings and a Funeral was the first depiction I’d ever seen of a gay couple on screen – especially a loving, normal couple whose narrative wasn’t mired in the Aids crisis. It’s also the first film where I’d ever heard a woman talk about having had a lot of sex with a lot of different men, without it being framed as a bad thing. And the protagonist’s brother is a fully fleshed out character who happens to also be disabled, so yes, it has as much diversity as the towel range at the White Company, and no, I don’t think that it passes the Bechdel test, but that doesn’t mean it failed across the board.
It’s not for me to inveigle myself in someone else’s family row – I’ve got plenty of my own family members to scold for their foibles. But despite sitting very much on the children’s table in this discussion, I’m afraid I think I’m on the side of the elders. Richard Curtis’s films could do with more diversity in their casting, but apart from that I think they stand up as well today as they ever did before, and I fully intend to keep watching them.
