I have never been big on holiday movies. They’ve always seemed to be nothing more than different offshoots of the exhaustingly redundant “let’s put 600 different couples and storylines in this movie and have them all connect in the end” plotline. In other words, most holiday movies are just different offshoots of the “Love Actually” plotline. 

“Love Actually” follows nine different couples, with nine different, yet interwoven lives. There’s expired rockstar Billy Mack and his manager Joe (although I’m still pretty confused about this… couple?), Jamie and his Portuguese housekeeper Aurèlia, Daniel the widower’s 11-year-old son Sam and his American muse Joanna (and eventually, Carol, a single mom who hits it off with Daniel), Karen (Daniel’s good friend) and her cheating husband Harry (plus Mia, the other woman), Prime Minister David (and Karen’s brother)  and Natalie, one of the household staff at 10 Downing St., newlywed couple Juliet and Peter (friends of Jamie’s), and also Mark, Peter’s best friend who is secretly in love with Juliet, inconvenient (or convenient, depending on how you look at it) co-workers John and Judy, regular co-workers Sarah and Karl (who work for Harry and with Mia), and Colin, a failed bachelor who takes to America in search of love. Does your head hurt already? 

The abundance of characters and storylines definitely makes the movie confusing right off the bat. Admittedly, several of the storylines are tacky and simply uninteresting. 

David and Natalie are a cute couple, but their relationship is completely predictable. Colin is, quite frankly, just annoying, and I could not have cared less about his American exploits. Mark’s infatuation with his best friend’s wife was offputting (especially when he basically made a fan edit of her at their wedding) and led to literally nothing. John and Judy are fine as a couple, but their roles in the movie seem out of place and jarring. And Sarah, who carries around a ton of emotional baggage, barks up a two-word-sentence-speaking tree in an almost painful-to-watch way. 

But, despite over half of the couples being either hard to watch, irrelevant or just plain weird, the rest of them tried their best to make up for it. 

Billy Mack’s snarky cynicism makes you laugh every time. No matter how brittle and empty inside he may seem, his one-liners catch you off guard enough that you have to laugh. Daniel and Sam’s father-son relationship instantly warms your heart. Watching the pair navigate grief, first love and terrible drumming skills is a sweet escape from the drama of the other couples. The Karen-Harry-Mia love triangle itself is uninteresting, but Karen’s character makes it worth the watch. She is sturdy and loving, though initially seems to be a bit of a pushover. However, Karen releases her own quiet form of rage onto Harry when she discovers his affair, and you realize she was never a pushover to begin with. 

For me, it was Jamie and Aurèlia who stole the show and solidified “Love Actually” as holiday movie blueprint material. Jamie and Aurèlia face a language barrier in their relationship, but both of them end up learning the other’s language to try and foster some sort of relationship. This kind of saccharine sweet act is exactly what makes the rom-com genre so fun, and it’s exactly what I’m looking for when I sit down to watch a romantic comedy. 

“Love Actually” strives to establish that love is all around us, and I will admit, it does succeed. By the end of the movie, all kinds of love have been established. There is romantic love. Love for one’s country. Love between siblings. Love between families. Love between friends. The penultimate success of  “Love Actually” is its portrayal of the complexities of love. Through that alone, it deservingly earns its holiday classic title.

On this blog, members of the Carmel High School chapter of the Quill and Scroll International Honorary Society for High School Journalists (and the occasional guest writer) produce curations of all facets of popular culture, from TV shows to music to novels to technology. We hope our readers always leave with something new to muse over. Click here to read more from MUSE.