Uptight, emotionally stunted movie trailer producer Amanda (Cameron Diaz) trades places with the sweet-but-neurotic British reporter Iris (Kate Winslet). Hilarity ensures (or is meant to ensue) as the women adjust to each other’s lives and become romantically entangled with the men they find in their supposedly polar-opposite environments. Amanda meets, and argues with, and falls for, and argues with, Iris’ charming, too-good-looking-to-bother-developing-a-personality brother (Jude Law), and Iris in turn begins to fall for a witty movie score composer Miles (Jack Black).

It quickly plays out, however, that the scenes featuring warm-hearted Iris and her slow-budding romance with Miles are more interesting by far than the scenes featuring the annoyingly wordy Amanda and her steamy-to-stuffy affair with Graham (please, please Iris- burn those sheets!)

This may be due in part to the fact that both Winslet and Black, in these roles anyway, are much more capable at adapting their stock characters into something resembling actual humanity while skillfully wading through the sometimes embarrassingly-cliché dialogue. Iris, while sometimes coming dangerously close to testing the limits of self-pity in relation to her past affair with the emotionally-cheating, dastardly ex-lover Jaspar (oh come on, like you wouldn’t use the phrase “dastardly ex-lover Jaspar” in a sentence if you could), still manages to make herself likable simply through her warm smiles and the selfless attention she pays to an ailing neighbor/has-been Hollywood writer (Eli Wallach). Black also is a fully sympathetic character who hand-delivers the only real laughs of the movie (“Whoops, boob graze. Totally accidental.”)

Cameron Diaz, on the other hand, does nothing but disappoint throughout "The Holiday." The jury’s still out on whether it’s her acting (which has definitely delivered in past roles), or the writing of her character that contributes to the overall downfall of Amanda’s storyline. Diaz tries so hard to make Amanda kooky and relatable in the grand tradition of chick-flick leading ladies, but somehow all of her efforts translate as stilted and posed. Her dialogue is either screeched out or warbled, her air-guitar-playing-I-am-woman-hear-me-roar scenes blasted to the soundtrack of The Killers are so embarrassing you almost have to look away, and it is never believable that her neurotic ramblings, instead of driving away the Jude Law character as they reasonably would any other man, cause him to fall madly and desperately in love with her (in two weeks, of course).

However, although it may be true that this two-part romantic comedy could (and should) have been boiled down to a one-part romantic comedy, it still doesn’t fail to deliver exactly what it promises. Although the opportunities for comedic cross-cultural mishaps are sorely underused (except for one exceedingly unoriginal scene where Amanda tries to drive a car on- gasp- the wrong side of the road), the movie still manages to pull the best out of both its Hollywood, Ca. and Surrey, England locations. And anyway, Nancy Meyers’ fans probably aren’t looking for a complex tale of isolationism and escapism that this type of storyline could potentially provide if it were a different sort of movie. In fact, the average person with a strong wish to see "The Holiday" will probably greatly enjoy it just as it is, awkward crying scenes and all.

And, oh yeah…

SPOILER ALERT

There’s a happy ending.

Comments

Mom Written by Guest on 2006-12-17 20:49:28 So, yet another movie I can wait and rent on chick-flick night! Thanks for the heads-up!

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