The Girl in the Café (2005) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

"Three hours next to the dullest man in Canada. And that's a pretty competitive category."

 - diplomat's wife in The Girl in the Café -

Writer Richard Curtis (Four Weddings, Love Actually) always seems to write a part for Hugh Grant. I suppose Hughie is his alter ego. Regrettably, Mr. Grant appears to have been unavailable for this role, so the Grant part - the stammering Londoner maladroit at courtship - fell to Bill Nighy, who had previously stolen another Curtis show as the fading rock star in Love Actually. Nighy manages to go Grant one better in the stammering department, and takes the character even further inside himself by refusing ever to make eye contact with anyone. In fact, Nighy's interpretation lacks any of Grant's jaunty manner, so he takes lines that Grant would suffuse with knowing Wildean irony and turns them into something more like "humor offered tentatively." Nighy plays a 60ish senior-level civil servant in the Exchequer's office whose entire life is his financial calculations. He's the ultimate policy wonk, and he is so lonely, so deferential, and so lacking in social graces that he fairly begs for our pity from his first appearance on camera. His life seems to have settled into the routine that will carry forward indefinitely until death -  when a chance meeting changes everything.

As he takes his fifteen minute tea break one day, with a timid eye on his watch so as not to keep his masters waiting, he has a chance meeting with a girl in a café, simply because the spot across from her is the only available seat. It turns out that she is just as shy and lonely as he is, but they initiate some sort of glacially slow courtship. In time, he must attend the G-8 summit in Iceland and his job level allows him to bring a significant other, so he invites the only woman he knows socially - the girl in the café. By the time they arrive in Iceland together, he has never kissed her nor even held her hand, does not know her last name, knows nothing of her back-story, and is not even aware that they will have to share a single room with a single bed!

They manage to work through the uncomfortable moments, mostly by confining their conversations to the problems faced at the G-8 summit. Eventually the girl will accompany Nighy to various dinners and cocktail parties, where she will share her compassionate, idealistic world-view with just about every important world leader. And maybe, just maybe, her simple and emotional pleas will affect the world.

Or not.

I think you can deduce from that description that the global portion of the film has some problems in the plausibility department. The relationship portion, however, works quite well. Curtis took on an almost insurmountable challenge - how can one take two painfully shy Londoners and somehow get them sharing a room in Iceland without ever having held hands before, and without knowing anything about one another? Somehow, he solved this puzzle successfully and credibly.

As for the politics?

Well ...

The Girl in the Café was made with a very specific agenda. It was the Curtis contribution to the Make Poverty History/Live 8 campaign. In essence, Curtis was challenged to make a film that would reinforce the group's goal of halting world poverty, and would express in artistic and emotional terms the ideas which others were charged to express in songs or spreadsheets, according to their talents.

• If you know about that going in, and you're OK with it, you may find this to be a painfully slow but effective film, not very entertaining, and too low-key and melancholy to generate much interest to casual renters, but nonetheless touching in many small ways, and appealing to more discriminating moviegoers.

• If you know about that and feel that it is a great idea, you may join a legion of others who found this film a profoundly moving experience.

• If you don't like the sound of the agenda, you'll find that the film is filled with black-and-white politics and extremely unlikely events in macrocosm, although you may still enjoy the small, realistic moments which take place between the lovers.