Impossibly: handsome, beautiful, feisty, and well...

The Holiday – Nancy Meyers

Meet the Impossibles. The impossibly gorgeous Cameron Diaz, has been impossibly jilted (is there a man on earth who would? But then is there a man on earth who wouldn’t?) and seeks a man-free holiday by exchanging houses with impossibly feistily sexy Kate Winslett whose long-term lover neglected to mention his upcoming engagement. To someone else.

Man-free space for Cameron Diaz is of course impossible short of joining a closed order of nuns or orbiting Venus in a one-woman spacecraft. About as likely as a honeycomb with no bees. Dressed for LA, all dark glasses, stillettos and fur, she unconvincingly humps her luggage up the English country lane, impossibly beautiful in the snow (snow? what happened to the drizzle?) which her stretch limo was too big to negotiate. She eventually arrives at Kate’s impossibly picturesque little cottage as remote and rural as the top of a Christmas box of Thornton’s chocolate creams.

Having just arrived, finding the miniaturisation of domestic life necessitated by an English country cottage versus an LA mansion too challenging, she decides it was all a big mistake and resolves to head back to LA ASAP. No camp-in-the-woods, enjoying the hardships kinda gal our Cameron. Her man-free space having extended for all of 4 to 5 hours and going for the record, impossibly handsome Jude Law turns up pissed on the doorstep, looking for relief from an overburdened bladder resulting from over-indulgence at the local pub. I can’t have been the only man in the cinema bemoaning the unfairness of fate at this point. Jude Law has a skinful, toddles down the lane for a pee in his sister’s house and ends up in bed with Cameron Diaz. At her invitation if you please. We ordinary mortal males in contrast get half an hour of excruciating discomfort wondering whether we dare risk an indecent exposure charge before nervously ducking behind a low hedge with embarrassingly little foliage. Ah me – to those that have, shall more be given. Anyway what kind of wuss goes all the way to his sister’s house for a pee instead of democratically sharing our terror of discovery behind the aforementioned hedge? One deficient in the essential manly arts and with a distinct lack of masculine solidarity, that’s who.

If I turned up late at night asking to use Cameron Diaz’s loo, I suspect the result would be an invitation to the local police station rather than her delectably warm bed. But of course our Jude is so impossibly nice and honourable, that this totally undeserved fulfilment of most men’s fantasy, seems in his case to be merely a matter of elementary politeness. Lonely woman in a foreign country? How could a chap refuse? Especially an English chap.

Meanwhile in LA Kate Winslett thinks she’s died and gone to Hollywood heaven. In a house barely big enough to house the average British leisure centre, she zaps the electronic curtains and indulges in impossibly engaging girlish frolics as she relishes the opulence the whim of fate has bequeathed her. When a less than impossibly handsome Jack Black calls to pick up something on behalf of Cameron’s jilter, presumably to help the poor sap pass the time in the lunatic asylum, we know, we just know, what’s gonna go down. Mystery movie this ain’t. It’s about as hard to follow as the London Underground map. With no Mornington Crescent.

Jack scrubs up nicely after all that monkey business in the jungle (King Kong) and the neatly coiffed hair would get him expelled from any self-respecting Rock School. Though alone among the cast, not impossibly good-looking, Jack compensates by being even more impossibly charming, loveable and witty in a self-deprecating kind of way. And he can write tunes. Always a romantic plus.

When Kate spots octogenarian Eli Wallach wandering in a semi-Alzheimic daze in the street outside the Diaz mansion, she offers him a lift home. Which canny old Eli accepts gracefully for the 100 yard journey to his own mansion next door. Eli is a great, now retired Hollywood writer. He is an impossibly twinkly delight looking as if he has just time-warped in from an old Frank Capra movie. Wallach has a ball and the playing between him and Winslett has real style and no little wit. She of course adopts him – how nice-English-girl-abroad can you get – and sets out to coax him to the lifetime awards ceremony he’s been avoiding until a beautiful feisty English broad comes along to make it worth going. Fate really is insufferably benign to everyone in this movie. But then they are all so impossibly nice, one can’t bring oneself to complain.

Cut to cute rural UK. Cameron, having wrestled mightily for around a minute and a half about whether she wants a relationship that goes deeper than a quick romp in the hay with a wandering drunk looking for a comfortable pee, decides to confess her feelings and pops round to Jude’s modest little country retreat which has a few less windows than Buckingham Palace. But they are all lead-lighted. Hello, we think, finally this is going to get real. And sure enough, for all his boyish charm and those “you-know-you’ll-forgive-me-anything” eyes, we discover Jude is playing house with two other girls. One is nine, the other six. And his daughters are of course, you’ve got it, impossibly delightful. And both possess that irresistible combination of childish candour and stern, wise-beyond-their-years insights that English child actresses excel at.

Of course the kids immediately fall in love with Cameron. Well ok – who doesn’t? And in this best of all possible worlds, Jude is not sullied by anything so murky or doubtful as D-I-V-O-R-C-E as Cameron puts it. No, his already impossibly endearing character leaps into mega-nice space as he reveals he is a W-I-D-O-W-E-R, as he puts it. There are still a few serves and rallies to go but we know at this point that it’s a done deal – game set and match.

In LA, Eli’s genuine charm is outplaying Jack’s jokey flirtatious humour about 5 to 1, and casting a benign, warm glow over the Jack and Kate show. First Jack plays one of those intimate games new lovers play in Hollywood movies, this one has him humming, badly, movie theme tunes in the DVD store. But the absolute clincher, the this-relationship-is-just-meant-to-be moment, is when he writes a tune for Kate. While back in the UK Cameron and Jude have reached a pragmatic agreement to dispense with foreplay, Jack and Kate are enjoying much parrying before the thrust – if you’ll forgive the vulgarity. Mine, not theirs.

I have mentioned no character names, because there really aren’t any. No this is really Cameron, Jude, Kate, Jack, and especially Eli simply being their impossibly likeable selves within a loosely drawn narrative thread that enables us to call it a movie. This movie was either written precisely for these four to work together or arose from a good night out in LA when they decided they got on and why not have some fun together and make some money at the same time.

Don’t get me wrong, they are all likeable. There is personal chemistry on screen and judging by the satisfied, conspiratorial chuckles of enjoyment from the audience, it works all the way through to the charming impossibly happy ending.

Escape. Enjoy. But leave your critical brain-cells at home. Give them the night off. The Holiday is a syllabub movie: four delicious, simple, sweet, ingredients just whipped up together to produce a dessert so light it encourages you to keep spooning it up until its sweetness begins to make you feel just a touch queasy. But after that moment passes you still indulge in a little bit more before you go to bed. For romantics and escapists, the feel-good movie of the year.

But I still wish I was Jude Law – just for a day. Please God.

(March 2008)

Filed under: 3 star, Comedy, Hollywood, Humorous, Nancy Myers, Romance