Lightweight but Enjoyable

Rating: 7/10 (15 January 2010)

"The Holiday" is a romantic comedy which features two romances rather than the more usual one. (Mind you, "Love Actually" is a rom-com which tells the stories of numerous different romances). The two main characters are Amanda Woods, an American editor of movie trailers and Iris Simpkins, a British journalist working for The Daily Telegraph. (Spot the product placement!) Both have recently suffered romantic disappointments. Iris is suffering from unrequited love for a colleague while Amanda has discovered that her boyfriend is cheating on her. Looking for an escape, Iris goes to a home swap website, and exchanges homes for the Christmas holidays with Amanda, whom she has never met. This being a romantic comedy, of course, both women have to fall in love, Amanda with Iris' handsome brother Graham and Iris with a musician named Miles.
Apart from the double love stories the main theme of the film is cultural differences between more traditional Britain and more laid-back America, with both women coming to appreciate the good points of each other's country. These differences are emphasised by a difference in look between a wintry, snowbound Surrey, where Iris lives in a quaint rural cottage and a sunny Los Angeles where Amanda has an ultra-modern luxury home. This was presumably the point of setting the American scenes in southern California, one of the few parts of the USA to remain warm and sunny even in December; had Amanda lived in, say, New England the visual contrast between the two settings would have been lessened.
One of the difficulties with a "double rom-com" like this one is that there is not always sufficient space to tell both stories in detail. Here the "English" Amanda-Graham romance is developed in greater depth than the "American" Iris-Miles one. The English story involves much more character development and tells the normal rom-com story of how the obstacles to the love of the two characters are overcome. In this case the main obstacle is that Graham initially seems to Amanda (and the audience) to be a charming but selfish womaniser; it is only later that she discovers the truth about him, namely that he is in reality a widower looking for a stepmother for his two young daughters. The story of Iris and Miles, by comparison, seems a mere makeweight. Indeed, much of the American story involves Iris' friendship with the elderly screenwriter Arthur who seems to have known all the great names from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
This was Kate Winslet's last film before she went on to make the ultra-serious "The Reader" and "Revolutionary Road" in 2008, so I was glad to see that she can also act in something lighter. I was also pleasantly surprised by Cameron Diaz, who made Amanda an attractive heroine. In the past I have normally associated Cameron with rubbish like "The Sweetest Thing" and "Charlie's Angels" and have regarded her as being out of her depth when attempting something more serious like "Gangs of New York". "The Holiday", however, is one of her better performances. The generally reliable Jude Law was also good as Graham, and there is also a nice cameo from the veteran Eli Wallach (aged 91 at the time) as Arthur. The one actor I did not like much was Jack Black as Miles. Black seems most at home in zany comedies; rom-coms are not really his forte.
One of the main pleasures for me was recognising places I know, as I used to live in Guildford, close to Godalming and Shere where the scenes in England were filmed. Overall, "The Holiday" is a lightweight film, but a pleasant and enjoyable one. It makes a more welcome addition to the ever-growing corpus of Christmas films than much of the sentimental slush we have to endure year after year. 7/10