Evangelicals Now
Christian news worldwide
magnifying glass Search archives
home Home check the archives Archives Subscribe Subscriptions Advertising Information & booking of classifieds Adverts Find a local evangelical Church Find a church for the search engines and extremely curious! About us Contact us Site Map
Printable
Version

Notting Hill

Notting Hill
Director: Roger Mitchell
Stars: Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant
123 minutes. Cert. 15

Love is alive and well, and evidently lives in Notting Hill. Written by Richard Curtis, this is the much-trailered follow-up to Four Weddings & A Funeral, not a sequel in terms of story, but in terms of romantic/ humorous style, and its main star.
Hugh Grant plays William Thacker, who runs a slightly seedy travel bookshop in the eponymous area of London. Divorced, he shares a house with a shaggy lunatic Welshman, who seems to spend most of the film leaping around in his underpants.
Strangely, ethnic minorities are lacking in this Notting Hill, but in true Curtis style, there is the usual group of long-standing friends, including: the girl with orange hair, the disabled one, and the lonely failed stockbroker looking for love. The match kicks off when the beautiful film star Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) walks into William's bookshop and thence into his life.
The question the film poses is: 'Can the most famous film star in the world fall for the man in the street?' It deals with a most accessible fantasy for most of us, that a nobody should be singled out for attention in love by a somebody. Most of the film is just a light-hearted celebration of friendship and love, with some fairly bad language, and the theme of media intrusion thrown in.

Love is great

However, if there is a message in the film, it makes two points about love. The first is that love confers distinction wherever it falls. It turns the loved one into a star. For example, the touching devotion of William's disabled friend and her husband, serves as a foil to the main plot of the developing relationship, with all its ups and downs, between William and Anna.
The second is to do with the adjustments that must be made when love bridges two very different worlds - the bohemian run-down world of Notting Hill and the highly organised and media intense life of a film star.
The Christian can take some encouragement that the evident popularity of this film in cynical 1990s Britain shows that people still admit that love is the greatest thing, and a life-long monogamous heterosexual commitment remains the ideal.
The fantasy of being made special by the love of a superstar is something that the Christian knows as a reality: 'How great is the love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called Children of God!' (1 John 3.1).

JEB
Dr John Benton