Notting Hill

Notting Hill is a better film than it gets credit for, partly because it’s been softened by familiarity. People remember the lines, the garden, the press conference. What they forget is how quietly sad it is for most of its runtime — a film about the particular loneliness of wanting someone who lives in a completely different world than you do.

Hugh Grant plays William Thacker, a travel bookshop owner in West London who is ordinary in every sense that matters. Not stupid, not broken — just a man living a pleasant, unspectacular life in a pleasant, unspectacular part of the city. When Anna Scott walks into his shop, played by Julia Roberts at the precise peak of her particular kind of stardom, the film doesn’t pretend the gap between them is small. It sits with that gap. It lets it be genuinely uncomfortable.

The supporting cast does the work that romantic comedies often hand to montages. The communal dinners, the friends around the table, the flatmate Spike in his rhinoceros-print underwear — these aren’t comic relief. They’re the texture of William’s actual life, the thing he’d be giving a version of up. Richard Curtis understood that you can’t feel the weight of a choice if you don’t first feel the weight of what’s being chosen between.

The film earns its ending. Not because Anna says the right things at the press conference, but because William has already decided to stay in his life and she comes to find him in it. That distinction matters. He isn’t rescued. She shows up.

Elvis Costello’s “She” plays over a sequence midway through that follows a full year of seasons in two minutes. It’s one of the better uses of a song in any film of its era — unhurried, a little melancholy, not trying to tell you how to feel so much as create the space to feel it.

Put this on for a quiet evening. It asks very little of you and gives back considerably more than it promises.

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Verdict

Warmer and sadder than you remember. The kind of film that rewards a second watch once you stop waiting for the famous parts.

Pour

Something English and unhurried. A gin and tonic if you’re in the right mood. Tea if you’re not.

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The romantic comedy that trusts its quiet moments continues in You’ve Got Mail, and the famous stranger who changes one ordinary life goes back to Roman Holiday. Both are made for a Sunday night.

Planning an evening around this? The Rewatched Favorite →

Worth owning, not just streaming. Find it on Blu-ray.

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