The Holiday


by Shari L. Rosenblum

It was a cold, cold day.  The theater was packed with forms of the female persuasion—giddy groups of teenaged girls, hopeful twenties, wistful forties, thirty-somethings with their 5-year-olds.  There was clapping when the closing credits rolled.  The elderly woman beside me, who had hobbled in annoyedly during the trailers, carping crackle-voiced about seating availability and selfish youth, was now completely softened.  “What a nice, sweet film,” she murmured to me honey-toned, relieved. “Nothing ugly, nothing bad.”  Even as I catalogued the film’s flaws in my head, I had to agree.   Sort of.

It is unlikely that The Holiday, the 2006 female empowerment rom-com from female empowerment rom-com queen Nancy Meyers, will shock or amaze its audiences.  Filled as it is with meet-cutes, over-articulated life lessons and glimpses of happily ever after, it does not readily invite us to look beyond its clichés and heavy-handed allusions.  But there is something more in it than a brief summary might suggest.  If Meyers is the portraitist of the modern woman, then the modern woman seems finally to be coming into her own.

Iris (Kate Winslet) and Amanda (Cameron Diaz) are beautiful, creative and intelligent women from opposite sides of the Atlantic, each of whom finds herself betrayed by her own bad choice of lover just as the holiday season (and all the depression it reportedly promises for the single and underloved) rounds the corner.   Rather than wallow in the teary-eyed oblivion, fridge full of chocolates, self-deprecation and male-bashing one-liners that usually serve as prelude to female recovery in the movies, Iris and Amanda advance posthaste past Go.  Through the miracle of the Internet and new-age fantasy, the two heroines—each a homeowner in her own right—agree to trade spaces to get as far away as possible from the beds they’ve made and no longer want to lie in   (“Is tomorrow too soon?,” Amanda asks.  Iris assures her that it is not).  

So it is that Amanda, who produces trailers for feature films in L.A. and spares herself no luxury, lands in a cozy little cottage in snowy Surrey, off the paved path, while Iris, a wedding columnist for The Daily Telegraph committed to settling for less, gets to resize her expectations for the land of swimming pools and movie stars and Santa Ana winds that make anything possible.  Some might call this a formula set-up, and Meyers does not strain to disabuse us of the notion.  We are treated, as we might predict, to long high-heeled treks in the snow from an over-packed Amanda (Diaz is primed for pratfalls), and uncharacteristically unreserved glee from Iris learning to live large.  But the fish-out-of-water scenarios in this film seem less intended as comedic premise than as perspectival shifts, and soon the focus is on discovering what fits rather than what does not.

And this is where the novelty comes in.  Self-actualization does not require self-alteration here.  In the standard empowerment paradigm, the subject woman is presented to us as an incomplete or imperfect being, modeled on some negative female or anti-feminist stereotype.  She is a spoiled child or a frigid child-hater, too princess-y or too into her career, too open or too closed to male attentions.  Her point of departure is usually some form of victimization by some man or men, and her empowerment, granted after she goes through a humiliation of trials and tribulations, generally takes the form either of salvation through her sexuality—the hero’s kiss, the baby’s pull, or in denial of it—re-creation as a female version of the hero himself—the phallus feminized.  The Holiday is a break from all that.

Amanda and Iris never see themselves as victims.  They exhale at their leisure, and are blissfully free of any fatal female flaw (unless, of course, you count the overbearing leitmotif of Amanda’s consciousness boomed aloud in trailer voice-over, Bridget Jones’ style).  They are independent, successful, self-assured, and open to possibilities—and if their hopes haven’t panned out, it’s because they’ve pinned them on the wrong donkeys (the film makes no excuses for the men badly chosen; it just doesn’t waste time pointing fingers at them either).  These women do not need to grow up, warm up, let go or learn to embrace the mother within. Their empowerment does not manifest in bootcamp discipline, sharp shooting, sword wielding, bulked up bods, told-ya-so superiority, rejection of romanceor the (drumroll) transformational orgasm.  If either swoons to sweet seduction, it is not because her hero takes her with overdue and liberating force, but because he gets her; not because he shows her who she is, but because he sees her as she is. 

Unfortunately, this is, in part, why the romances in the film, while somewhat sufficient for the genre, do not sizzle off the page.  The ease is too immediate.  There are no rivers to cross. There is no conflict.  There are no misunderstandings. There is nothing to resolve.  Jude Law, out-Granting Hugh in insanely sexy affability, plays Graham, Iris's brother and Amanda's love interest, with depths of sensitivity and emotional self-awareness that would embarrass Nicholas Sparks, while Jack Black as Miles, Amanda's professional colleague and Iris's potential beau, seems drugged into compliance acting, despite the occasional mad-eyed break from imposed maturity.  Both men are lovely in their own right, as creatures who reside almost exclusively in fiction, but neither seems to have the backbone that a woman strong as Amanda or Iris would likely find she needs in the long run.  Even Eli Wallach, who breezily directs the audience's understanding as an oldtime screenwriter with substantial Hollywood cred, is more about admiring a woman's strength (and his models of strength are both cinematic and real) than meeting her head to head.   Despite the paradigm shift, alas, there is still an inequality.

©2006 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene