Let me say, for the record, I am not a huge fan of Christmas movies. My favorites are While You Were Sleeping, The Ref, and Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol.
The trailer for The Holiday was at the end of another film I’d recently watched (Blue Smoke, a Lifetime movie made from my favorite ever Nora Roberts book). For some reason, I ended up purchasing three of the movies advertised at the end of the feature. Of the three, I thought I would like this one the least. Since I haven’t watched the other two, I can’t say whether or not that is true, but I can say I didn’t dislike this movie as much as I thought I might.
The cast, for the most part, was delightful. Except Jack Black. I do not know who thought Jack Black would make a good romcom hero, but their drugs need to be replaced. Kathryn Hahn and John Krasinsky had very minor roles with maybe 5 lines of dialogue each. Rufus Sewall portrayed a delightfully smarmy jerk. I choked when I saw a cameo of Dustin Hoffman in a Blockbuster store. Kate Winslet, Eli Wallach, Cameron Diaz, and Jude Law were all wonderful in their roles.
The story is about an American woman and British woman who swap houses for Christmas. Both are coming off bad romantic break-ups. Cameron Diaz’s character has a quirk that will be predictably resolved by the end of the movie. Kate Winslet’s character provided what I thought was the stronger plot thread, but it wasn’t a developed as fully as it should have been. And the whole Jack Black “romance” was just stuck in there for her, maybe so they could categorize the film as a romcom. I thought he and it were awkward and out of place. Maybe a differect actor would have made romance more believable.
I thought the pacing was off. Most of the movie seemed to focus on the Cameron Diaz-Jude Law romance, which was sweet and nice and had a cozy plot twist, but the Kate Winslet storyline with Eli Wallach as her mentor had real teeth and could have been deeper and much more powerful than it was. Without Jack Black.
But I still liked the movie.
