A promising but disappointing holiday movie

Rating: 4/10 (13 January 2007)

Nancy Meyers' The Holiday should be a nice little holiday movies. It should be the kind of movies you go to see with you boy/girlfriend for a quiet evening out or watch on DVD on a cold winter Sunday afternoon. It has a cute ensemble cast, a happy if predictable storyline and no ambitions to be anything more than it should be. But in execution it's just that there are too many irritating flaws to be able to enjoy it properly.
For the sake of brevity I will skip voicing my opinions of the film' traditional US movies ideal of what England is like in winter; like the idea that we always have snow at Christmas, Winslet's Iris has a highflying job in the city, but then goes home everyday to her rural cottage in the country, and security guards at Heathrow never, ever refer to people as "M'um" when going through your luggage! But the main problem in this film is that unfortunately Meyers has the strange belief that Cameron Diaz is the star of this film, and therefore should be carrying it at all times. From the get-go she is given the lions share of the screen time, trying so desperately to be funny and force out the laughs that it get embarrassing. She's trying so hard to look like a natural comedian that it reminds me far too much of other times she's tried so hard to be funny, such as The Sweetest Thing and the Charlie's Angels films. (Just typing the names I get sharp pains in my very soul.) What also doesn't help is how unsympathetic her character comes across to us; the highly successful film editor who owns her own company, has a huge house in LA. Oh no! Her life is so bad, I really feel for her. Even as she dumps her boyfriend for cheating on her at the start of the film we are clearly shown that it's her fault for refusing open up to anyone that has destroyed her relationships (leading to some very hackneyed character development involving her being unable to cry, therefore connect emotionally with people, since her parents divorced.) And this is a real shame as the other half of the film, with Winglets and Black's Iris and Miles, along with Eli Wallach's wonderful Billy Wilder-esqe screenwriter Arthur, works so well. These two 'secondary' characters are genuinely nice people, suck in bad relationships but needing to grow to escape them. Kate Winslet in particular creates a wonderfully sweet woman, unable to fall out of love with a colleague who uses her and desperate to find something new. She and Black just seem so much more relaxed and at ease with each other, with Black in sweet, chubby loser mode rather than 'Jack Black' mode, and they act Diaz and Jude Law off the screen whenever they come on.
I think Wallach's Arthur Abbott has a lot to do with this, as most of Iris and Miles story focuses around him and the influence they have on each other, whereas with Amanda and Graham it's all about them, even when the cute children are introduced they are just one more thing to bring the two of them closer.
To be fair it does get better if you stick with it. About half way through it settles into the story, Diaz seems to stop desperately trying to be funny, and Law is given something to do other than play up to his own media stereotype, and they amazingly actually start acting and their story starts gaining the heart it has been lacking at the start. But by this point the plot is so painfully obvious it's too late to save the film.
The Holiday does have it's good points, but they're almost all when Winslet is on screen. You leave the cinema with the feeling that if Meyers could have managed to write the story just involving Iris and Miles and left Amanda and Graham out completely she would have had a very nice Christmas movie. As it is, it comes across as a sub-par star vehicle/chick flick.