Total schlock

Rating: 4/10 (27 December 2006)

Contains Spoilers! I wanted to like this movie, I really did. Each of the four main leads I have enjoyed watching for years. And the previews looked amazing. But when you get right down to it, it's total schlock. The characters are cardboard, the story lines are filled with clichés, and the ending is predictable. There are more plot holes and NO WAY!!! moments in this film than Carter has liver pills.
We have Iris (Kate Winslet), a sweet English girl in love with a cad who has cheated on her with a co-worker of theirs, and then gotten engaged to said co-worker. Jasper (Rufus Sewell), the novelist object of Iris's affection is handsome, charming, and suave. He's also a two timing snake who can't bear to lose Iris despite the fact that he's engaged to another woman. When she hears of his engagement, Iris engages in a Sylvia Plath moment, when ba-bing! she gets an instant message from a newly single (and also cheated on) California businesswoman named Amanda who happens to find Iris's English country cottage on a homeswap website. Talk about being saved by the instant message! It seems Amanda has been in a bad relationship for a while, and finally ends it, and she wants to just chuck her life in Cali for a while and be all by her lonesome in another country to forget about her troubles. Her only prerequisite to swapping houses is that there are no men in the town that she is going to spend the Xmas holiday in.
Much to her surprise, it seems there is at least one man in that town-Iris's brother Graham (Jude Law) who shows up on Iris's (now Amanda's) doorstep drunk as a skunk after a night of drinking at the pub. Naturally, he has to spend the night, and Amanda sees it as an opportunity to have meaningless sex with a stranger because she is sure she will never see him again. Isn't that what Eli Wallach's character Arthur would call "meeting cute"? Law is great at playing the aloof commitment-phobe cads, and it seems like Graham is one of those. But alas he is not. He's on the fence about getting involved with Amanda because his life is complicated by Olivia and Sophie-his daughters. It turns out he is a widower with two cute as pie lasses and he's worried about turning their lives upside down by introducing a mommy figure into their lives. So, instead, he embarks on a relationship with a woman who has a full and complete life (sans Mr. Right) about 5,000 miles away from him. They try to hash out a way to see each other and maintain a long-distance relationship with him in London and her in LA, but she projects what the breakup would be like because she's a)turned cynical by the breakup of her parents and therefore unable to cry b)rebounding from a relationship that ended only the day before she slept with Graham and c)she's a realist who doesn't want to give up her life just to be with a man. Then he drops the bomb on her and tells her he loves her. She's stunned and can't say it back. It's okay though, because it's a romance and we know that all a woman's problems are solved by a sexy, handsome, and successful man who sews and buys his daughters tutus declaring his love in a British accent.
For her part, Iris is content to try and get over her broken heart by befriending Arthur, an elderly former screenwriter (Eli Wallach) and Miles (Jack Black), a film composer who she meets because he works with Ethan (Edward Burns), Amanda's ex-boyfriend. The homeswap happened so fast that Miles didn't know that a cute single girl would be living in the house. He is clearly attracted to Iris-even stopping to take something off her eyelash during a sudden Santa Ana wind-in front of his actress girlfriend, no less. He's involved with Maggie, but he only has eyes for Iris. Which is why when Maggie cheats on him, he has no problem hopping over to Iris, who is magically cured of her love for Jasper after he flies out to see her but is still engaged.
Despite the formulaic plot lines and sometimes nauseating dialogue they had to work with, the acting was good. Black and Winslet are delightful together. Law and Diaz have a ton of chemistry, which is why you root for them to stay together, at least for New Year's Eve. But did it have to take so long? The movie seemed like it would never end. But it did, and it left me disappointed. I give it 4 out of 10 stars.