Holiday, The

Two women swap places in this Christmas two-for-one special: a double serving of romantic comedy, with a sugar coating of knowing postmodernism. Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law and Jack Black star
The only way that you can truly have your cake and eat it too is to have more than one cake in the first place - a principle that is perfectly exemplified in Nancy Meyers' postmodern confection The Holiday, which does to the romantic comedy what Scream did to the slasher genre. Here you have two transatlantic relationships, two fish-out-of-water tales, two picture-perfect settings, two strong female leads - and also, ahem, twice the running time of your average frothy yuletide romance. After three years on and off again with the caddish man of her dreams Jasper (Sewell), 'Daily Telegraph' writer Iris (Winslet) finds out that he is engaged to someone else, and decides that she needs to get far, far away. By coincidence, on the other side of the globe, movie ad designer Amanda (Diaz) wants out too, after discovering that her live-in boyfriend Ethan (Burns) has been two-timing her. On impulse these two women on the verge of a nervous breakdown find one another on a house exchange website and decide to spend the Christmas break in one another's homes. Now ensconced in a modern LA mansion, Iris is quick to befriend Amanda's nonagenarian neighbour Arthur (Wallach) who, as a screenwriter from Hollywood's golden age, is determined to transform the Brit from 'best friend' to 'leading lady' - while schleppy soundtrack composer and late-entry love interest Miles (Black) begins writing her theme tune. Meanwhile in Iris's Surrey cottage, Amanda seduces Iris's dishy brother Graham (Law) into some uncomplicated seasonal sex, only to find things unseasonably complicated by love and worries about why her new beau keeps getting mystery phone calls from other women. Still, it's nothing that cannot be resolved by two and a quarter hours of holiday-making, soul-searching and lip-puckering. All too aware that she is always playing by the rules of her chosen genre, Meyers plays with irony. Arthur analyses Iris's problems in terms of a screwball script; there is a voice in Amanda's head turning her life into one of the slick trailers that she designs. When Miles is not name-checking his favourite film composers (including Hans Zimmer, who scored this very film), Iris is looking through Amanda's DVD collection (prominently featuring Enigma, starring one Kate Winslet), or admiring Arthur's Oscar (Winslet herself has been nominated four times, including for Iris). Amid such an abundance of self-referentiality, it seems only natural that the real Dustin Hoffman should be visible in the background of a video store where Miles and Iris are discussing his film The Graduate. In this cinematic hall of mirrors, movies ARE life. None of this actually dispels the film's reliance on hackneyed conventions. Meyers may have Iris declare, "I like corny, I'm looking for more corny in my life," and have her expressly attribute this desire to "all those movies," but this does not somehow magically make her scenes any less corny. Meyers may signal her awareness of just how cloyingly cutesy one particular sequence in the film is by having all the characters involved drink mugs of hot chocolate mixed with five marshmallows each - but that doesn't make things any easier to swallow. And Amanda's ad-style summations of her problems serve on the one hand to show how reducible they are to clich??, and on the other to direct the viewer's attention to how unnecessarily drawn out they are in the film. In short, all the clever-cleverness of The Holiday is cake-eating to excess. It may leave you gagging - just not necessarily for more. Still, Meyers' writing is a cut above, leaping between twinned storylines for maximum contrast, and updating the smart dialogue of Hollywood's golden age to a more modern milieu. [page break] The characterisation is less impressive. Winslet herself is far more the 'leading lady' than her giddily nice English Rose will ever be, and Diaz, for all her excellent comic timing, struggles to make Amanda likeable, let alone unpredictable. Their love interests, though well acted, are also on the bland side, and you can see Jack Black, in his straightest role to date, champing at the bit to launch into one of his improvised routines. Wallach is great just for being Wallach, and Arthur's relationship with Iris is the least conventional in the film - but its excessive sentimentality also encapsulates what makes the whole film stick in the throat.
Verdict No amount of ironic gift wrapping can conceal the triteness within, in this double-plotted festive chick flick that is too long by half, and too cloyingly sweet to be healthy.