It’s hard to watch something starring capital-M movie stars — say, for instance, Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant — and forget that “that’s Julia Roberts” or “that’s Hugh Grant.” Roger Michell’s Notting Hill (1999) would prefer it if you tried a little harder to keep the Hugh Grant-ness of it all out of mind: he’s playing an everyman divorcé with great floppy hair named Will who owns a bookstore in the titular London neighborhood. It doesn’t seem to mind, though, if you try finding the parallels between Roberts and the character she plays: a world-famous actress named Anna Scott who can’t go anywhere without worrying about the likelihood of a sudden paparazzi swarm. That’s because it’s a movie-length answer to these questions: what might happen if a movie star fell in love with an average Joe? And what would it be like to fall in love with Julia Roberts? (Sorry — Anna Scott.)
Anna is in town doing press for a movie in which she plays an astronaut with a spherical hairdo previewing the infamous one she had in Garry Marshall’s Mother’s Day (2016). She steps into Will’s shop, attention-grabbingly incognito in black sunglasses and a black beret, to mindlessly browse. They flirt a little; Will impressively manages to thwart an unslick shoplifter in the meantime. Then the pair literally, messily, bump into each other on the street a few hours later while he’s carrying a filled-to-the-brim cup of orange juice. He invites her back to his flat so that she can clean her shirt and change into something new. She impulsively kisses him on the way out.
So begins a movie-long game of romantic ping-pong where the two experience brief glimmers of a semi-normal romance in its nascence (e.g., him inviting her as his plus one to his sister’s birthday party, them sneaking into a picturesque gated community at night for a mindless stroll with a pretty backdrop). Then those glimmers are dimmed by movie-star interruptions (e.g., her just-as-famous stateside boyfriend showing up to her hotel unannounced, a nude-photo scandal that essentially forces her into hiding).
Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant in Notting Hill.
The glimmers are enough to make us want Will and Anna to see their romance through. Though some of that has to do with the easy wit and warmth of Richard Curtis’ writing, it has a lot more to do with the “that’s Julia Roberts” and the “that’s Hugh Grant” effect — the fundamental desire to see whether the stardom-imposed hardness Roberts maybe can relate to in real life can be softened by the good-naturedness of a man who speaks like he’s stumbling over his words but (mostly) actually manages to always say the right thing.
Notting Hill is surprisingly frank looking at the day-to-day unglamorousness of movie stardom — the long press junkets, the ways temporary residences become more like cages than homes away from home — and how much it generally can do a number on a person. You really can feel, and understand, Anna’s fury, for instance, in a climactic scene when Will tries to downplay the distressing violations of paparazzi harassment and tabloid scrutiny. The movie, though, can’t resist turning it into a laugh when, in another scene, Anna invokes the miseries of chronic dieting, dating pieces-of-shit Hollywood men, and the inevitability of being ridiculed for succumbing to the inexorability of age, because she did, after all, make $15 million off her last movie.
Notting Hill stretches credulity in how many runarounds Will must endure because of the caprices of a woman whose life is larger than his. The ubiquitous presence of Will’s big-personality, lily-white friend group also only puts into relief that, were Anna and Will not played by Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant, whose charms practically beam off them like lit-up orbs, they would not be that interesting of characters. (Emma Chambers and Rhys Ifans steal scenes like they would drop dead if they did not.) Anna and Will are vessels where lead-actor charisma and the tantalization of a good-for-a-rom-com premise can fill in what isn’t there. There are other problems with Notting Hill. It’s too long. Michell cannot resist a wince-inducingly on-the-nose needle drop. I still liked it. I wonder if that still would be true if Roberts and Grant were not in it, but that’s also something all films featuring capital-M movie stars should prompt. There’s a reason why not everyone who tries their hand at acting becomes one.
Peterson Reviews 
