Jude Law is glib. Cameron Diaz is perky. Kate Winslet is tragic in a perfect serio-comic way. They’re all gorgeous. And Jack Black, well, it’s hard to say what exactly he is doing in THE HOLIDAY as the object of Winslet’s eventual attraction. Writer/director Nancy Meyers certainly can’t be accused of typecasting by injecting Black, with his odd looks and even odder appeal, into a story about romantic fantasies, punctured and fulfilled, and the quartet of people working their way through them.
Winslet is Iris, the writer of marriage announcements for a London newspaper. It’s an ironic calling because she herself has been hopelessly in love with one of the paper’s columnists (Rufus Sewell) for the last four years, the last three of them unrequited. She can’t move on, and he won’t leave her alone, mostly for help in editing the novel he’s been writing. When the annual Christmas party also becomes the occasion for the announcement of his engagement to another woman, Iris hies herself to her picturesque cottage in Surrey to wail her heart out. When she’s done, mostly, she decides the best thing for her to do over the coming holidays is to get out of town. Using an online home exchange, she strikes a deal with Amanda (Diaz), a maker of film trailers who has just tossed out her live-in boyfriend (Edward Burns) for cheating on her. A workaholic with esophagal issues and an inability to cry, she, too, thinks a change of locale, and the time to eat carbs without guilt and to read all those books she’s been buying, is just the thing to get over the break-up.
There’s no getting around that this is a great idea. People will tell total strangers things that they would never tell their friends and so it is with Iris and Amanda, who immediately bond with the new people in their new surroundings. Iris with Arthur (Eli Wallach) the reclusive screenwriter from Hollywood’s golden age, and with Miles (Black), a composer who works with Amanda and who drops by to pick up the laptop the ex-boyfriend left behind. With Amanda, it’s Graham (Law), Iris’ brother who shows up snockered on Amanda’s borrowed doorstep her first night in England. He’s beautiful, she’s beautiful, they’ve both been tippling and one thing leads to another very quickly, especially after Amanda confides that she finds foreplay overrated.
Alas, the execution is feeble. There are some good moments with our foursome, but every time the film threatens to build up a head of genuine charm, it bogs down in treacley melodrama and/or maudlin sentiment. Or, in one awful interlude, Amanda engaging in a face-making contest with a dog (the dog wins). Law, Diaz, and Winslet are appealing in an irresistibly charismatic way. Black is modestly cute, but his toned-down peculiarity makes Winslet’s budding attraction smack of rebound of a most self-loathing nature. As for Wallach, he’s great; his role is trite.
Trite is the motif that most abounds during THE HOLIDAY’s two hours and then some of running time. There’s Amanda trying to negotiate driving on the other side of the road. There’s Iris doing a happy dance over Amanda’s palatial house having a swimming pool and a really good song programmed into the beside alarm. There’s Graham’s warning Amanda that women have a habit of falling in love with him. There’s Arthur being coaxed back into the spotlight by Iris with Miles writing the musical accompaniment to the occasion. It’s all recycled from other, better, films, and carried off with more panache in them.
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