If you want to make a case for Richard Curtis as the emblematic film-maker of the New Labour years, you can start with an uncanny coincidence. Four Weddings and a Funeral - a film that features a sudden Scottish heart attack and the eventual unlikely romantic triumph of a gauche former public schoolboy - was released in Britain on the day after Labour leader John Smith died, 13 May 1994. (I went to see it a couple of weeks later at the Screen on the Green in Islington, London; just up the road Blair and Brown were dividing the spoils in the restaurant Granita.) The film immediately seemed to catch a mood. Death and romance were already in the air; Major's Tories were waiting for their last rites; things could only get better.
You can't separate atmospheres out, quite, or see where one begins and another ends, but certainly in that summer of its genesis you could find some of New Labour's shiny, happy geography in what we have come to know as Curtisland. Four Weddings located a different kind of Britain to any that had been filmed before. It was neither kitchen-sink gritty nor carry-on smutty. It was an apolitical place, full of can-do possibility, obsessed with the educated middle class, perfectly relaxed about the filthy rich, much more in love with sentiment than ideas, and insatiable in its optimism; it was also in thrall to the idea of happy endings. This mixing of realities seemed like a two-way process. Curtis's inspired initiative for charitable giving in Africa, Comic Relief, which had begun a decade before, could hardly have been more Blairite in its simplicity. It concerned itself not with ideology or history or politics, but made a direct emotional appeal; it was messianic about fun and celebrity: have a laugh, resurrect a career, save the world.
As the Blair years unfolded, so did Curtisland become more populous. Looked at one way, Britain became the broken-home and teenage-pregnancy capital of Europe; looked at another, it was the subject of ever more feel-good, confetti-strewn, loved-up films. If they were not always from Curtis's pen, then at least they followed his winning formula: About a Boy and Jack and Sarah and (God help us) Wimbledon, among many others, featured men trapped in the eternal adolescence of Curtis's world, beset by the question of "to shag or not to shag", before eventually growing up and finding that love is all around us. It wasn't just men. Bridget Jones's Diary was the creation of Curtis's old friend from Oxford, Helen Fielding (it was Fielding who had originally insisted on putting a funeral in among the scripted four weddings; Curtis, as terrified as Blair of the downbeat, had until then imagined it as Four Weddings and a Honeymoon). Curtis returned the compliment by making Bridget Jones an authentic Curtisland movie.
Bridget herself, dippy and solipsistic, exercising her democratic duty to shop, was high on New Labour from the beginning. Election night in 1997 had been a kind of epiphany: "Cherie Blair is fantastic. You see she, too, would probably not fit into tiny bikinis in communal changing rooms. She, too, has not got snooker ball bottom yet somehow is able to obtain clothes which encompass her bottom and still make her look like a role model. Maybe things will change under Blair, who will order all clothes shops to start producing clothes which will fit attractively over everyone's arses. Worry, though, that New Labour will be like having a crush on someone, finally being able to go out with them and then when you have your first row it is cataclysmically awful. But then Tony Blair is the first prime minister I can imagine having voluntary sex with..."
This kind of sentiment seemed to travel well; Curtis mastered the knack of making the parochial international. He could open his blue front door in Notting Hill and sell the idea of it around the world. Curtisland was among the least "cool" products of Cool Britannia, but it was always perfect for export; Britain was suddenly a sunny, witty, self-deprecating, charming kind of place, a Doris Day film by the Thames in which it was forever Christmas. It was perhaps no coincidence that the plots of Four Weddings and Notting Hill hinged on the infatuation of tongue-tied British males with worldly American glamour. Much like Blair's Labour party, the films told audiences across the Atlantic almost exactly what they wanted to hear about the old country.
It was also inevitable that Hugh Grant would eventually play a version of Tony Blair (in Love Actually) even shallower than the original; one who would make bad jokes about special relationships just as the country was mired in war. There was a strange coincidence of dates there, too. In the week that film was released George W Bush visited the "real" prime minister, and was treated to an authentic fish and chip supper in Sedgefield, Durham, a photo opportunity that cost about £1m to stage and required the removal of net curtains from all the windows in Blair's constituency, for security reasons. A dinner that you could not have made up.
Curtis, never wholly dictated to by plausibility, also imagined such a meeting, but in terms that were beyond the bounds of possibility. He had his British and American presidents share a press conference in which Prime Minister Grant denounced his counterpart as a bully - although admittedly not because he assumed his compliance in an illegal war, but because he had witnessed the president make a pass at the object of his own desires, Natalie the Downing Street tea lady (Martine McCutcheon).
This prompted a real-life response from Blair in a conference speech, protesting that the reality of the relationship with America was necessarily more complicated than anything in a Richard Curtis film (you're telling me). The implied criticism of Blair in Love Actually, was in any case balanced by another piece of rhetoric which might have come directly from the prime minister, at least in his vicar of St Albion mode. The opening of the film made the defining statement of Curtisland philosophy, his considered response to 9/11: "Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport," Grant's character says. "General opinion's starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don't see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it's not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it's always there - fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge - they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I've got a sneaky feeling you'll find that love actually is all around us..."
Curtis subsequently did not have to restrict his policy ideas to his films. In 2005, as a spokesman for Live8, he was able to set part of the agenda for the G8 summit that Blair hosted at Gleneagles. And, a couple of years later, when Blair eventually called it a day, it was Curtis who scripted the most memorable part of his valediction - the prime minister's appearance opposite Catherine Tate on Comic Relief set the tone of his legacy: "Am I bovvered?"
The sychronicity between New Labour and its favourite film-maker continues into the Brown era. When Gordon Brown holidayed on the Suffolk coast, the closest reality to Curtisland that England has to offer, the writer donated his personal trainer. Curtis subsequently hosted a dinner party in which he teasingly sat Brown opposite the man who played him in Stephen Frears' The Deal, David Morrissey. It was perhaps no surprise that, in the words of Vince Cable, Brown went from "Stalin to Mr Bean in a matter of weeks".
And the blurring of Curtisland and reality has not stopped there; Curtis's new film, his first cinema release for six years, once again triumphantly captures the political moment: it is the tale of the sinking of a ship of fools. Having been there at the birth of New Labour, Curtis provides the perfect metaphor for its demise.
Viewed in this way, The Boat That Rocked, a distinctly un-seaworthy retelling of the story of Radio Caroline - partially saved by the usual roster of Curtis's gags - is one of the sharpest pieces of political satire you are likely to see this year. It puts together a gang of egotists still high on the ideals of the 60s, documents their schoolboy rivalries, their infatuation with their own power and hipness, pitches them against a moralising government (in the shape of Kenneth Branagh and Jack Davenport), and watches them go down beneath the waves still playing the same old songs. What starts as the best of times, ends up as the Titanic
Just because this is ostensibly a period piece does not make it any less authentically Curtis-esque. You can tick off the landmarks as you go along. Hopeless floppy-haired young man in love (in the form of Hugh Grant-substitute Tom Sturridge): check. Seriously eccentric, slighty pervy room-mate ("Thick Kevin"): check. Preposterous wedding (complete with comedy rings): check. Bill Nighy playing oldest swinger: check. Rhys Ifans playing fool: check. Sudden bursts of ironic expletives in any potential lull: check. Happily, Curtisland is a place where anything can be recycled.
One of the things you come away from the film with, apart from a dizzying sense of déjà vu, is the realisation that it is a brave man who tries to salvage his directorial reputation with a romantic farce set on a leaky boat. Curtis is nothing if not positive in his thinking, however. Having proved pretty comprehensively in Love Actually that he was no director, he repeats that trick. Another trait Curtis seems to share with Blair is the admirable virtue of a thick skin. He took some awful stick for Love Actually: the New York Times suggested it was a bag of trash right down to its neatly tied ending. But the more he is rubbished the stronger his conviction appears to grow. He won't take no for an answer.
In this respect, Curtis sees himself as an eternal optimist in a sea of pessimists. He tends to look his critics in the eye. "I don't have a very cynical set of friends," he said recently. "Cynical people believe everyone else is cynical. They regard non-cynical people as simply ultra-cynical. Supposed non-cynical people are merely pretending to be non-cynical in order to make money from other cynical people. So cynics who watch Love Actually think it is a cynical attempt to make money. No amount of evidence could prove to them that it ever had anything to do with goodwill. All I would do is encourage people with a cynical frame of mind to get on with it. Cynics Nose Day hasn't raised any money yet."
One unique thing about Curtis's career is that we have come to see him, the scriptwriter, as the creator of Curtisland, a reversal of the natural order of cinema: his directors - Mike Newell in Four Weddings, Roger Michell in Notting Hill - barely got a look in. What the later films reveal is that though Curtis may have been an endless source of inspired one-liners and "goodwill" - a trick he learned at Oxford when he started writing revues for his contemporary Rowan Atkinson - it was his collaborators who were able to put these lines in the mouths of consistent characters as well as plausible caricatures.
Curtis is a reluctant interviewee, but one of the occasions he did open up was in an onstage discussion at the Directors Guild with his wife (and sharpest editor) Emma Freud. In response to the question of how he came to write films he responded with a clear sense of his limitations. "I practised by being a sketchwriter and then a writer of sitcoms," he said, "a particular craft at making little three-minute sections of things funny, and I took that skill on to movies: so I've tried to put in as many funny bits as possible and make them resemble a plot. I had a very lucky break when I asked Mike Newell to do Four Weddings and a Funeral. Mike is a serious, beautiful person, a wonderful director. What he succeeded in doing is to hide the fact that the original script read much more like a series of sketches."
Roger Michell did something similar in Notting Hill, but when Curtis was left to his own devices in Love Actually, his directorial debut, the whole stubbornly stayed in its discrete three-minute parts. There was no uniformity of tone, no sense that these stories of lovers belonged with each other or had any existence beyond the confines of the film. There was no such thing as Curtisland society (however unlikely a concept that had always been: only Curtis could write a movie about Notting Hill, London's most diverse borough, and not feature a single black face in it).
Curtis has talked in the past of Robert Altman being his hero as a director for the way he could juggle a dozen storylines in Short Cuts or Nashville and give them a sense of shared purpose. For all of his gifts, Curtis does not have that particular genius. The fracturing is even more pronounced in The Boat That Rocked, which veers wildly in tone between college skit and big-budget disaster movie. It has its share of funny set pieces, but everyone seems to have a different film in their head. Philip Seymour Hoffman, never less than brilliant, tries to invest his character - an ageing DJ - with something like an authentic life (much as Emma Thompson did in Love Actually), but that just highlights the fact that no one else really bothers. Branagh contents himself with barking the name of his underling - "Twatt" - for comic effect. Nighy curls his thin lips; Ifans does his seedy thing. Every so often the action cuts to the living rooms of a place that is not quite Britain, where gaggles of nurses and frustrated posses of schoolgirls dance round their wirelesses.
One of the explanations for this absence of belief in the authenticity of Curtisland perhaps is to be found in the writer's biography. Curtis was born in New Zealand, the son of a Unilever executive. He grew up in exapatriate style in Stockholm and Manila before attending Harrow, where he became head boy, and Oxford, from which he took a first in English. This charmed life may have been full of the idea of England, but it did not contain much of England itself. Perhaps that is why Curtisland can sometimes seem a collection of postcards, or something imagined from a story that his mother once told him. In Four Weddings, this was a virtue; it lent London a fairytale quality. By repetition, it has come to seem ever more contrived.
In truth, even in the early days Curtis was never a great soloist. The first series of Blackadder, which he wrote on his own, was nowhere near as precise as those that followed, on which he collaborated with Ben Elton. Without a partner, he seemed too much like himself - a chirpy McCartney without a rebarbative Lennon. "All you need is love" has been a mantra of the films; but he also used to get by with a little more help from his friends.
This desire to be a one-man band, and not just a writer of scripts, appears to be born of an unlikely immodesty. There was a likable kind of humility about the scale of Four Weddings - the production team at Working Title scraped the barrel to be able to afford Andie McDowell - but as the budgets have grown, so, apparently, has Curtis's sense of what he is capable of. Somewhat like Blair, he seems to feel he is a pretty straight guy, but also a lone positive voice. He seems to want his films to evangelise the idea that the world is nowhere near as grim as most film-makers like to think. "I really do believe that there is a tremendous amount of optimism, goodness and love in the world and that it is under-represented. But if you do feel it and experience it then you should write about it..." This is, he argues, an inherited trait, something he shares with his father. "I think 'sentimental' is a complicated word," he has said. "A lost word. What is wrong with being touched by what goes on around you? I am very touched by what is good and true. It's a family characteristic. It was very true of my dad in his final years. Whenever he talked of an act of kindness I can remember the tears in his eyes. And I can't help being emotional when I come across something kind, when I find how warm people can be."
It is admirable, that faith, but when translated wholesale to movies it borders on sanctimoniousness. You imagine the films that Curtis would love to make are updates of Frank Capra, comedies that make grown men cry. But it is hard to imagine a film further removed from It's a Wonderful Life than, say, Love Actually - despite all the Christmassy bonhomie. Jimmy Stewart's happiness comes through struggle and defeat; he learns something about himself, he is faced throughout the film with genuine choices. Curtis does not have the capacity for such hard thinking. The only struggle in Curtisland is between the constant lure of irresponsibility and self-pity, and the possibility of Cupid striking to solve everything. Despair is rarely a possibility, only awkwardness or embarrassment; Hugh Grant's most obvious struggle is to complete a sentence.
If anything, The Boat that Rocked takes that shallowness into uncharted waters. We are not required to care, really, about any of the characters. Love may be all around them, but it never develops much beyond a teenage crush. No one is seen to build anything, or work at anything; they just try to convince themselves over and over again that this is the time of their lives. In that, too, you might say, it is also very much a product of its time.
