Leaving Notting Hill.

I saw a DVD of the film Notting Hill in a charity shop last week and decided I ought to buy it because I estimate that I’m one of probably about a hundred people over the age of 12 in the whole of the UK who’s never seen it. I remember it being quite celebrated when it was released twenty years ago. I remember the posters and the people saying oh what a lovely film it is. And I remember feeling vaguely inadequate that I could neither agree nor disagree.

(I also remember a Christmas night I spent among a gathering of actors in a flat in Notting Hill, only a few years before the film was made. I remember being fascinated by the way they conducted themselves, especially upon observing the curiously lurid and sickly energy which seemed to be passing between two male actors, both of whom I knew to be married to women.)

So I bought the DVD and tonight I watched it. Well, part of it at least. After 40 minutes I couldn’t stand any more and switched it off. I thought it remarkably analogous with candyfloss – all sugar and air, no substance whatsoever. Everything about it was at best predictable and at worst weakly overplayed. It must surely stand as the poorest of the simpering and sugar-coated Britpack genre which was making even the commercials look semi-intelligent around that time.

With one exception: Rhys Ifans. He was the only item of substance in the whole dreary affair. Then again, I’ve never yet seen Rhys Ifans be anything less than remarkable. (With one exception; there’s always one exception, isn’t there?) Luna Lovegood’s dad in the Harry Potter series. But that wasn’t his fault; he was simply given nothing to work with. What on earth possessed him to lend his remarkable presence and skills to this pile of insubstantial fluff escapes me. Maybe he’d only read his bits of the script.