7 / 10
Official trailer
The Holiday is Nancy Meyers’s 2006 American-British romantic comedy depicting two women in unhappy relationships, an English country-newspaper columnist and an American film-trailer producer, who swap homes for Christmas across the Atlantic and find new romances during the holiday season. Kate Winslet plays Iris. Cameron Diaz plays Amanda. Jack Black plays Miles. Jude Law plays Graham. Eli Wallach plays Arthur Abbott. Edward Burns plays Ethan. Rufus Sewell plays Jasper. Nancy Meyers wrote the screenplay. Columbia Pictures and Universal Pictures co-produced the film for theatrical release in December 2006.
Meyers made The Holiday as her fourth feature as director after What Women Want, Something’s Gotta Give, and The Parent Trap.
Put me down as a fan of The Holiday, with one big asterisk. Winslet’s half of the film is warm, funny and wise, and Eli Wallach gives it a heart I’d trade the rest of the movie for. The Diaz and Law half is where my attention drifts, and that half is the reason it’s a 7.
Meyers’s specific subgenre, the high-thread-count romantic comedy, is fully present in The Holiday. The English country cottage and the Los Angeles modern home are both rendered as aspirational interiors with serious set-dressing budgets, the wardrobes are designer-elaborate even when the screenplay calls for casual moments, and the entire production reads as both romantic comedy and travel-magazine spread. The dual-protagonist transatlantic-swap structure gives the film two parallel love stories, with Winslet’s English-village arc generally registering as the stronger of the two.
I find Meyers’s kitchens and cottages seductive, even when the set-dressing budget is showing in every frame, and I don’t hold the travel-magazine gloss against a film that’s selling a fantasy of a fresh start.
Kate Winslet’s Iris
Winslet’s Iris carries the stronger of the film’s two parallel plotlines. The character begins as a woman in a destructive relationship with her newspaper colleague Jasper, who’s engaged to another woman while continuing to maintain emotional dependence on Iris. Her transatlantic escape to Amanda’s Los Angeles home becomes her way of confronting her own pattern.
Iris’s friendship with the elderly retired screenwriter Arthur Abbott, played by Eli Wallach, is the film’s quietest and best subplot, and it’s the part I’d keep if I could only keep one. Their relationship gives Iris something her romantic history has denied her: a person who recognizes her worth without asking anything in return. Wallach is the film’s strongest single element, and he gives Winslet the screen partner her character needs.
For Writers
Romantic-comedy protagonists benefit from non-romantic relationships that the screenplay treats with equal weight. Iris and Arthur Abbott’s friendship is more emotionally real than Iris’s eventual romance with Miles.
Cameron Diaz’s Amanda
Diaz’s Amanda is the weaker parallel plot. The character is professionally successful, romantically wounded, and incapable of crying, all of which the screenplay treats as the character’s defining traits without developing them with the same care it gives Iris. Diaz plays the workaholic-trailer-producer energy with commitment that the writing doesn’t quite reward.
Amanda’s romance with Graham, Iris’s brother, develops through standard romantic-comedy beats without the detail of Iris’s plot. The widower-with-children subplot adds family-drama stakes the screenplay never fully integrates, and this is the stretch where my interest sags. I kept wanting it to cut back to Iris and Arthur. That’s a shame, because Diaz and Law both give committed performances the writing lets down.
For Writers
Parallel romantic plotlines often unbalance in development. The Holiday’s Amanda plot is conventional romantic comedy while the Iris plot is something more significant.
Eli Wallach’s Arthur Abbott
Eli Wallach was ninety during production and his Arthur Abbott is the film’s emotional center. The character is a former Hollywood screenwriter and Writers Guild member, lonely in his retirement, whose friendship with the visiting Iris reawakens his sense of professional purpose. Wallach plays the role with full late-career weight and resists every available sentimental shortcut.
The writers-on-writing material in the Arthur Abbott scenes is some of Meyers’s strongest dialogue, and as a writer I eat it up. Arthur’s slow thaw toward Iris, his decision to attend the Writers Guild tribute, and his reunion with Iris deliver the film’s best emotional payoffs. The tribute is the scene that lifts the film to a 7 for me. Wallach received particular critical recognition for the performance, and he deserved all of it.
For Writers
Veteran actors in late-career roles bring weight that younger actors can’t replicate. Wallach’s Arthur Abbott carries decades of acting history into every scene.
Craft Note
Meyers produced and directed the film with her trademark attention to interior design and lifestyle aesthetics. The English country cottage was a constructed set built for the production after location scouting failed to find a suitable existing house. The Los Angeles home was a Brentwood estate dressed for the production. Hans Zimmer composed the score. The film grossed approximately two hundred five million dollars worldwide on an eighty-five-million-dollar budget, solid commercial performance that’s been considerably extended through annual television broadcast.
Is The Holiday worth watching?
The Holiday works entirely within Nancy Meyers’s high-thread-count romantic-comedy tone, and it delivers what that audience wants with a lot of polish. Winslet and Wallach make it, and their half would get something close to an 8 from me.
The Diaz and Law romance drags it back down, because it’s a romance I never quite believe. Averaged out, it’s a 7, and a cozy one.
