Every year around this time, romantic comedies just like The Holiday come along, knowing they will sell tickets – regardless of the film’s quality – purely because of the festive spirit of the season. This time, however, the cast of The Holiday just can’t stand up to the challenge of breathing life into such a tired, cliché story line.
In this movie, the American Amanda (Cameron Diaz, In Her Shoes) and the English Iris (Kate Winslet, Little Children) are tired of their surroundings, their relationships and, most of all, their respective lives. When they both finally decide they need to get away from their complicated situations, they go through a house-switch website and move into each other’s homes for two weeks. Predictably, the two women fall in love with local men and must decide once and for all which lifestyle they want to pursue after the holiday is over.
Amanda is stressed out from her recent breakup with a cheating boyfriend and her job editing movie trailers – we learn she is a high-paid whiz whose talent lies in creating trailers that make crappy movies look like hits. But Diaz’s lines are better delivered when she is having an online conversation with Winslet’s character than when she is actually conversing with other characters in the real, non-virtual world. Every piece of dialogue Diaz delivers that has the potential to be funny just isn’t; it’s no wonder her biggest blockbusters in the last three years have been as the voice of an animated ogre in the Shrek 1 and 2.
As Graham, Amanda’s love interest and Iris’ brother, Jude Law (All the King’s Men, Closer) is his amusingly British self throughout the film. His slightly endearing role is the only thing to look forward to when the plot meanders back to him and Diaz, but the pair exhibited the most on-screen chemistry when talking to Winslet on a three-way phone call. And that isn’t saying much, is it?
Their awkward un-chemistry is seen most obviously during the spontaneous “let’s throw caution to the wind and make love” scene, which instead ends up as a drawn-out mess of dialogue. The scene attempts to set up, in classic romantic-comedy fashion, a meaningful relationship between Amanda and Graham, but it just isn’t believable – especially because, according to the film’s timeline, Amanda just broke up with her live-in boyfriend yesterday. Furthermore, we can only assume the pair end up sleeping together on Graham’s sister’s bed, as Amanda is living in Iris’ house. Eww.
On the Iris-related side of the film, Winslet plays the jaded character, who works at a newspaper with the man who broke her heart three years ago by cheating on her with a co-worker. It doesn’t help that her ex and the co-worker just got engaged, and – as if life weren’t cruel enough already – Iris is the engagement and wedding reporter for the paper.
But upon moving to Los Angeles, Iris not only gets the house of her dreams but a distraction from her cruelly ironic life. She befriends her new neighbor, the aged screenplay writer Arthur Abbott (Eli Wallach, The Hoax), who tells Iris it’s about time she got to play the leading lady in her own life. She soon meets Miles (Jack Black, Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny), a movie-score writer who has a cheating girlfriend he soon loses to start a relationship with Iris.
Winslet shines in this role, playing heartbroken and flirtatious moments equally well. She is appropriately funny and sweet throughout the entertaining subplot with Wallach, whose character is also refreshingly amusing. Winslet also fits well opposite Black, who never fails to deliver a laugh. He falls back on his well-known musical brand of comedy, serenading Winslet with the scores to all the movies he picks up in the video store. An added chuckle comes when Dustin Hoffman, playing himself, looks up from across the store as Black sings “Mrs. Robinson” with The Graduate in hand.
The Holiday could have been salvaged had Diaz been written out and Law just kept as Iris’ older brother. But thanks to Diaz’s and Law’s screentime-heavy, barely developed love story, the film spends too little time on the love story between Black and Winslet. Ironically, the unnecessarily-long The Holiday ends up leaving viewers feeling shorted on both storylines. Go figure.
Contact reporter Courtney Pomeroy at diversions@dbk.umd.edu.
