|
ARCHIVES
|
In Praise of All Things Hugh Grant Posting Date: Feb 9 2009 1:27AM I remember reading an anecdote in a magazine as retold by someone who knows Hugh Grant’s mother. The story goes like this … Mrs. Grant is at a party of some description where someone asks her what her children do for a living. Mrs. Grant says, “Well, one of my sons is a banker and the other is a movie star.” “Oh how interesting,” says the new acquaintance, “a banker.”
Hugh Grant gets no respect, not even from someone who is face-to-face with his mother, so let’s set the record straight … Hugh Grant is the greatest actor of his generation.
Yes, he plays the same character in every film.
Yes, he is starting to look increasingly like Paul McCartney, which isn’t a good thing because Sir Paul is starting to look shockingly like a fifty-year-old woman.
Yes, what we know of his personal life is more or less a disaster that includes obviously bungling whole thing with Elizabeth Hurley, dating a high-profile woman named Jemima and receiving sex acts in a car from a rotund street walker name Divine.
Mr. Grant also probably holds the record for the actor who has said the word “kebab” in the largest number of films.
All of these factors work against him, admittedly. And now that I think about it, most of his films have some sort of fatal flaw that makes parts of them unwatchable.
Usually, you have to look no farther than his watery bunch of leading ladies – Andie McDowell in Four Weddings and a Funeral was probably the worst, but Jeanne Tripplehorn in Mickey Blue Eyes was obviously in over her head and all fourteen of the Bridget Jones movies starred Renee Zellweger whose eyeballs long ago disappeared behind surgically-altered lids of puffiness. There was the phoning-it-in Sandra Bullock in the improperly-punctuated Two Weeks Notice and the chubby and nearly anonymous former British soap actress in Love Actually. I mean seriously, that movie has about six hundred and four name actors in it, everyone from Liam Neeson to Claudia Schiffer and Mr. Bean get screen time in that movie. They couldn’t have made a little room for Amy Adams or Anne Hathaway to play the housekeeper to the British Prime Minister (sorry if I’m giving away too much plot here)?
Oh, and don’t even get me started on costarring with Mandy Moore (Mandy Moore?) in American Dreamz.
Hugh is also the victim of some pretty clunky dialogue. Here I’m thinking of Notting Hill where he not only has to keep from laughing when Julia Roberts says to him, “I’m also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her,” but he has to repeat that line back to his friends in the very next scene and do it with a look of downtrodden anguish. It’s a travesty he didn’t get an Oscar for that.
Actually, now that I think about it, if you throw away his early not-yet-a-star roles in all of those British costume dramas, he has only made one film that is beyond reproach: About a Boy and that was a movie where his job was to play a shallow turd with no emotional dimension. Hardly a challenging day at the office for Mr. Grant.
Now that I’ve thought this all through, I suppose I’m more or less obliged to change my stance on the greatness of Hugh Grant. My Hugh Grant DVD collection has suddenly become nothing more than a sad romantic-comedy paperweight, which in some ways is a tragedy.
There’s a certain appeal to Hugh Grant movies and to the man himself. He’s far more entertaining than say, Al Pacino. Which movie would you like to be forced to watch every six months for the rest of your life – Grant’s mostly-lame Music & Lyrics or Pacino’s Oscar-winning “Hoooo-ha!!” performance in Scent of a Woman? I thought so.
Perhaps there is great benefit in living a life unexamined. It brings a certain freedom and ease. It creates a greater variety of options. It untaxes your brain. It also allows you to appreciate Hugh Grant and is that really so bad? |
