A LIGHT-BLUE CHRISTMAS
How The Holiday makes you sad (and a little glad) to be single during the holidays
The Holiday opens exactly like a Nancy Meyers romcom should: a woman is about to Go Through Something.
In this case, it’s Iris (Kate Winslet), and her voice-over about love is the perfectly morose antithesis to the schmaltz offered by standard romantic Christmas movie fare. (I’m looking at you, Love, Actually.) “Unrequited love,” she says, is the kind of love that “can kill its victims.” She is one, as she’s about to find out. The man she loves, whom she also works with, has just announced his engagement to another colleague. And, as a newspaper writer whose beat is the society pages and engagement announcements, she’ll have to write about it.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, we’re introduced to Amanda (Cameron Diaz), a movie-trailer editor. (The heroines in Meyers movies always have jobs you knew existed but never knew anyone to hold.) When we first meet her, she is embroiled in a shouting match with her cheating boyfriend, a soundtrack composer, who is about to become her cheating ex-boyfriend.
Serendipitously, our two heartbroken heroines simultaneously decide they need to leave their respective cities, and so they enter a home-exchange program (think Airbnb, but it’s 2006, and you switch homes, and both homes are meticulously decorated and everything is even more perfect than your most Pinteresty dreams). Before you’ve even had time to settle into your couch cushion, both women are on last-minute overseas flights.
My hope as I re-watch The Holiday every year (okay, multiple times a year), is that it will subvert the rom-com clichés of the hopelessly single protagonist. For a moment, it does. Both women realize they are better than the vapid, horrible men who defined their lives to this point. They’re successful and great at their jobs. They’re homeowners! There’s cause for celebration, ever so briefly. The Holiday could be about newly single gals about to embark on a life-changing holiday; a trans-Atlantic Eat Pray Love that’s mostly just the Eat part.
But the self-empowered fantasy doesn’t last very long. Iris tries to kill herself with her gas stove. (The scene is played off as a moment of weakness as she hurries to get a breath of fresh air from her kitchen window and says “low point” under her breath.) And Amanda wonders what destination is appropriate for a “loner, loser and complicated wreck,” as the Hans Zimmer score treats her like a lowly Charlie Brown instead of a brilliant woman and friend.
But then, they’re rescued by love. Iris falls for a composer friend of Amanda’s ex, played by Jack Black. They have an adorable moment together at a Blockbuster. R.I.P. (When it comes to dates, scrolling through Netflix just isn’t the same as walking through aisles.) Amanda falls for Iris’s brother (Jude Law), a widower and father of two adorable girls. Eventually, the foursome all become friends, and spend New Year’s Eve together.
And yes, this all happens over the span of a two-week holiday.
The Holiday can be a frustrating movie for the rest of us — the ones who’ve had to listen to countless Christmas Eve surprise engagement stories; the third wheels (or fifth, seventh, ninth, whatever uneven number); the ones who’ve accepted single life as their fate. But rest assured, for us, there is Iris’s holiday neighbour (Eli Wallach). Throughout the film, he offers up sage pieces of wisdom, including one of my all-time favourites. He tells Iris that in movies, there are leading ladies and best friends, and he doesn’t understand why she is acting like a best friend.
With all due respect to Wallach, though, best friends can be single, funny, successful and offer advice and be whole. It’s the leading ladies — even in a Christmas rom-com — who aren’t complete unless they have a partner in their life.