THE HOLIDAY 2006
48%
Written and directed by Nancy Meyers
Starring Kate Winslet, Cameron Diaz, Jude Law, Jack Black
Synopsis
Two women—one a London wedding columnist, one an Angeleno who makes movie trailers—swap houses for the holidays when they both find they need to escape some tangly romantic situations at home. Each gets more than they bargained for from the house swap when some new and even more tangled romantic situations arise in their new cities. Romance, cuteness, and cashmere ensue.
Why We Love It
For many thinking moviegoers, enjoying a Nancy Meyers movie requires much suppression of self and sense. Got hang-ups about class? Consumerism a turnoff? Have a Bechdel test on hand? You’ll need to abandon those, all ye who enter. But the Meyers-verse can be like Las Vegas—if you accept what it is and go in with the right frame of mind, there are sugary pleasures to be had.
In movies like It’s Complicated and Something’s Gotta Give, those pleasures are rarely derived from story or character—the sugar highs are found in ogling mammoth kitchens with continent-sized marble islands at their centers and the expensive, pillowy beige knits in which Meyers’s leads live their lives. It’s about drinking in the Nancy Meyers aesthetic and fantasy. The Holiday might be the most Nancy Meyers of Nancy Meyers movies, marrying her trapped-in-a-West-Elm-with-no-way-out aesthetic to the sentimentality of Christmas and featuring not one but two too-good-to-be-true Nancy Meyers–style romances.
The two women at the center of the dual love plots seem to spend much of their time marveling at the fact they’re in a Nancy Meyers movie. When British Iris (Kate Winslet) arrives at the L.A. manse of Amanda (Cameron Diaz), she plays stand-in for the audience, bouncing on the plush California King as if it’s too good—and too huge—to be true; when Amanda arrives at Iris’s uber-British cottage to set up shop, even the grinchy Angeleno is charmed by the too-perfect Christmas village ornament she’s going to call home for the holidays.
While characters in other Meyers movies take for granted their ludicrously well-appointed lives, the characters here can’t believe the luxury, on one hand, and the quaintness, on the other, of their vacation lives. Even the men are too good to be true. Diaz’s Amanda is offered a perfectly lit Jude Law (as a caring single dad, no less), and Winslet’s Iris is served Jack Black, whose only discernible personality trait here is his need to make her smile.
There is substance in this heaping cup of very sweet hot cocoa, though. And that comes courtesy of Eli Wallach, as an elderly neighbor and super-knowledgeable Golden Age screenwriter who befriends Iris and becomes her tour guide through L.A. and its history. Winslet and Wallach are electric in a way that makes you wish the director had done away with the love stories and made a buddy comedy. It’s this thread that gives the movie its heart and makes Meyers’s Christmas confection more than just empty holiday calories.