Love In A Bookstore

Roberts, Grant Bring Charm, Comedy To `Notting Hill'

May 28, 1999|By Mark Caro, Tribune Movie Writer.

`Notting Hill" plays on a common male fantasy: You're working your everyday job when a beautiful starlet walks in, you strike up a conversation, and she finds your down-to-earth niceness such a refreshing change from Hollywood phony-baloney that she falls for you. (A female version of this scenario exists as well, but it'll have to wait for another movie.)

Whether this is a fantasy that should be encouraged is a worthy topic for debate. Our society has become so fixated on celebrity that getting a lasting smooch from Hollywood royalty is seen as the ultimate validation for the average Joe. Rare is the romantic comedy in which the hero and heroine become mutually turned on by their well-matched intellects and interests.

That said, you'd have to be a killjoy to deny Hugh Grant's humble bookseller the pleasure of Julia Roberts' mega-wattage company in "Notting Hill." This is a romantic comedy that just flat-out works. It's funny, sympathetic, mostly smart, and it boasts a likable cast of characters led by two performers who have star power and know how to use it.

Roberts, no surprise, is utterly convincing as a cinematic superstar who gets much mileage out of her toothy grin. The opening montage of Roberts' Anna Scott being photographed at various glitzy events, as Elvis Costello croons Charles Aznavour's "She" on the soundtrack, may prompt fears that you're about to sit through a two-hour toothpaste commercial.

Still, Roberts brings Anna sufficiently down to earth to occupy the same plane as Grant's William Thacker, the owner of a travel bookstore in London's multicultural Notting Hill neighborhood. Grant is plenty magnetic himself, but like Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, he naturally projects an unassuming, everyman front. You admire his good looks and still think he's one of us.

William doesn't stammer like some previous Grant characters, and he's obviously intelligent, yet he's still a bit of a fumbler. The key is that his mistakes are little, human-scale ones easy to identify with, like when he bad-mouths a travel book that Anna winds up buying after she wanders into his store. His one genuine pratfall -- spilling orange juice on Anna's front -- provides the movie's most awkwardly contrived moment.

"Notting Hill" screenwriter Richard Curtis previously wrote the similarly literate "Four Weddings and a Funeral," which provided Grant his most winning, three-dimensional role to date. The writer and actor seem especially well-matched, in part because they both understand the art of underselling a joke.

At one of the comic high points, William accepts Anna's invitation to visit her at her London luxury hotel only to discover that a press junket for her latest movie is in progress, meaning he must pose as a journalist to get a few private words with her. Some filmmakers and actors would play this situation for broad farce, but Curtis, Grant and director Roger Michell, who showed such a deft touch with the 1995 Jane Austen adaptation "Persuasion," trust the situation to provide the humor. While asking questions on behalf of the rather inappropriate magazine he spontaneously has claimed to represent, William struggles to keep a straight face not because he knows he's funny but because he's mortified at having put himself in that position.

The screenplay fleshes out William's life more than Anna's. Though the movie nails many particulars about the entertainment business, her career is particularly hard to fathom; the implication is she's coasting on her looks, yet she receives Oscar recognition for a movie that looks like it could be called "2001: A Space Chick."

What's clear is that Anna is a big, big star wilting under the pressure of constant attention, and whether or not Roberts really is like the actress she is portraying, she does imbue Anna with a tangible sense of vulnerability. When Anna invites William up to her room, her eyes betray not seduction but desperation.

Still, Curtis' script wisely doesn't turn Anna into a martyr. William's family and friends would happily trade their problems for hers -- a point nicely made when William takes Anna to his sister's birthday party and everyone engages in a contest of self-pity oneupmanship.

Like "Four Weddings," "Notting Hill" benefits from a colorful array of supporting characters, including William's scene-stealing slob roommate, Spike (Rhys Ifans), who's endearing like a shaggy dog; William's best friend, Max (Tim McInnerny), and his level-headed, wheelchair-bound wife, Bella (Gina McKee); William's goggle-eyed sister, Honey (Emma Chambers); and Bernie (Hugh Bonneville), a stockbroker with foot-in-mouth disease.

With the exception of one lyrical passage in which William walks through a neighborhood market as the seasons change instantaneously, Michell keeps his style effectively inconspicuous. Missing, oddly enough, is much sense of the title area; the movie is better at showing William's immediate community than the larger neighborhood around him.