Some cheeses are meant to be eaten rotten, others thrown away when rot sets in. The cheesy Rotting -- sorry -- Notting Hill is of the latter variety. A supposed romantic comedy, it is stale, soggy, and, if it weren't so irritating, soporific. It concerns the glamorous Hollywood superstar Anna Scott, who wanders into William Thacker's travel bookshop in London's multiculturally chic Notting Hill section. When the overeager William spills orange juice all over Anna's blouse, she improbably agrees to come to his flat across the street to repair the damage.
Forthwith, the rusty wheels of cutesy romance creak into motion, and now it is only a matter of how long the screenwriter, Richard Curtis, and the director, Roger Mitchell, can postpone the preposterous but predictable ending with every well-worn delaying tactic.
Absurdity would be forgivable if it were charming, witty, or sexy, but all three qualities are in short supply here. The initially icy Anna thaws out fairly quickly and becomes open to William's timid, gangly courtship. You can tell that this is an English film by the way the passive male dithers, blithers, and gets muddled, while the aggressor female makes all the advances till the penultimate moment. Unfortunately, reverse clichés are still clichés.
Hugh Grant's William, with the virginally blue eyes and carefully careless-seeming coiffure -- two shocks of brown hair framing his ingenuous countenance, the rest descending, neatly terraced, onto his nape -- is all adorable awkwardnesses, chief among them a much-repeated long pause followed by a sheepish "Right!" Julia Roberts's Anna, overcome by so much masculine sweetness, is the first to kiss, the first to make a date, the first to invite upstairs to her suite at the Ritz-though not in years have we had a bedroom scene with so little eroticism, never mind bed in it. Waking up together, the lovers discuss the uninterestingness of breasts, with William allowed one brief peek under Anna's decorously protective sheet, and the rest of us not even that.
There are more pauses in Nothing -- sorry -- Notting Hill than in a Pinter play, but only because the characters are bumblers, particularly William, whose tongue seems to be into advanced bondage, although he can deliver second-rate witticisms quite trippingly. He is saddled with a randy and foul-mouthed Welshman, Spike, for a flatmate, amusingly played by Rhys Ifans. Anna reminds us how hard her life as a star earning 15 mil. per picture is, which, of course, breaks the hearts of us making 14 or less. There are standard comic friends and relatives for William, including a punker sister and a happily married couple whose ardor isn't dampened by a fall that confines the wife to a wheelchair.
There are a few funny scenes, though, notably one in which William, to get to see Anna, must pretend to be an interviewing journalist from Horse and Hound and is forced into a bizarre line of questioning. The love story, however, which ends with William proposing to Anna during a huge press conference at the Savoy, is rather like a long bath in a tub of alternately hot and cold pineapple juice.
The mistimings and misconstruings and assorted contretemps that roughen the course of true love culminate in a scene where stellar Anna seeks out pining William in his shop and utters the soon-to-be-classic line, "I'm also just a girl standing in front of a boy asking him to love her." Not being able to stand yet another potential heartbreak, he sadly sends her away. That the still unwrapped present she brought him is the original of his favorite Chagall painting may contribute to his changing his mind.
At a movie whose every other moment makes you wince, and whose rock-music soundtrack makes you groan in between, you have to divert yourself in other ways. So you notice that Grant has tolerable upper teeth but, in best British dental tradition, disastrous lower ones, and start admiring his skill at smiling mostly with his upper lip. Or you marvel at how Miss Roberts's visage -- despite excess nose, mouth, and ears -- does not fail to captivate. But whenever you are diverted back to the film at hand, you merely feel like giving it the finger.
Tea with Mussolini is based on a couple of paragraphs of the Italian director Franco Zeffirelli's autobiography, in whose very foreword we read, "No one tells the full truth about themselves." The screenplay by Zeffirelli and John Mortimer is indeed highly fictionalized (mostly by Mortimer, I guess, as Mr. Z. says in the same foreword, "I am a raconteur rather than a writer"), and its content of truth seems about as full as a hunter's moon.
It concerns a gaggle of British ladies of a certain age leading a charmed life in Florence in the '30s, pursuing hobbies if affluent, and working at respectable jobs if not. They are known to the locals as the scorpioni for the sting of their meddling superiority. Their leader is Lady Hester (Maggie Smith), widow of a former British ambassador and great fan of Mussolini's because of a once-shared tea. Arabella (Judi Dench) officiously protects frescoes and fancies herself a singer. A butch American archeologist, Georgie (Lily Tomlin), is a showy lesbian. Most level-headed is Mary (Joan Plowright), a secretary and translator, who becomes de facto foster mother to little Luca, her boss's bastard and Zeffirelli's alter ego.
There are also other British ladies, but all are eclipsed by a flamboyant American, Elsa, a lucratively widowed ex-Ziegfeld girl (Cher), who generously and anonymously shares her wealth with the rest until, being Jewish, she lands in mortal danger. Though Mary does admirably by Luca, his proto-fascist father packs him off to Austria to learn German, as the Duce and the Führer form an axis, and war is about to break out. By the time Luca returns as a young man, the scorpions have been interned at picturesquely medieval San Gimignano, and it will be up to Luca and the partisans he valiantly joins to rescue them.
That is about as much as you need to know, though there are many incidents of mingled charm, sentimentality, and even suspense, laced with dollops of wit. Frankly, I didn't expect old Zeffirelli to show so much verve and viability at this late stage, yet he does better here than in his bejeweled prime. Credit also his shrewdly picked collaborators, notably the droll Mortimer and the great cinematographer David Watkin. Watkin keeps the exteriors fresco-like in tone (one sunset on the Arno is pure Giotto, had Giotto painted sunsets) and his interiors bursting with life. There is also intelligently spare background music, and Florence itself is enough to melt the eye.
All the smartly cast actresses perform yeoman's work, only Lily Tomlin may have been allowed a few balls too many. The two Lucas, child and youth, are equally adorable, Mr. Z. being especially fastidious about choosing his alter egos. But it is Joan Plowright who walks away with top honors in a performance that blends warmth and pawkiness, sparkle and gravitas, heart and backbone. So perfect a being could hardly exist, but the actress makes her grittily alive without allowing the occasionally circumambient sentimentality to creep into her work. Yet even the film's tear-jerking is executed with a certain restraint; there is not that much tea in Tea with Mussolini, but the sympathy is ubiquitous.
