The portrayal of a grown-up

There are certain movies that I always try to watch around Christmas, like The Muppet Christmas Carol and The Holiday. And Love Actually, which I have adored since Carrie and I saw it in the theater. There's so much to love about that movie--the cast, the reality of some of the storylines, the complete lack of reality of others, and so on. But as I watched it recently, I realized something else that I like about it.

As I get older, one of the things I struggle with is the concept of being a grown-up. I don't feel like a grown-up. I look at my friends and don't feel like they're grown-ups either, despite our discussions of things like taxes and mortgages and getting the best car insurance rates and the fact that an increasing number of them have children.

So I was watching Love Actually and I realized that one of the things that I find really endearing about it is how it illustrates that, as they said on Buffy, love makes you do the wacky. There are moments when so many of the characters make these expressions, like, "What did I just do?" It's one thing for Baby in Dirty Dancing to have her "I carried a watermelon?" moment, but it's another to see Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, and Laura Linney make basically that same face. It's reassuring to see that in some ways, we just never grow up.

(Related: I was watched a documentary about Monty Python this weekend, and one of the members--John Cleese?--made a comment about how he basically never had to grow up. It's just weird to see this older man talk about how he's essentially still a kid. The older I get, the more I think everyone really feels that way. No matter what's on the outside, we all still feel like we're 15 a lot of the time.)