Film Reviews

The Holiday

• Rating:
• Director: Nancy Meyers
• Starring: Jack Black
• Details: US / 120mins (15A).

A dim-witted chimp, if it was given enough time, and had thrown enough of its own excrement at a typewriter, could have written the script for The Holiday. LA movie trailer editor Amanda (Diaz) breaks up with her boyfriend (Ed Burns) and decides to swap houses with English journalist Iris (Winslet), broken-hearted because the cad she loves is marrying someone else. Swearing off men, the two swap cities and meet book editor Graham (Law) and music composer Miles (Black) respectively. You can figure the rest for yourself, but just in case you were thinking of going along because there's a chance they might do something different, they don't - everything happens exactly the way you expect it to. The adaptation of Maeve Binchy's Tara Road already explored how obvious, plodding and mind-numbingly boring a film like this can be; but Meyers, with the added advantage of a larger budget, better locations and bigger stars, should have been able to break up the tedium. She doesn't, but then again, she didn't even try. With Winslet's quaint cottage set in a snow-covered idyllic countryside and Diaz's grandiose house in sunny L.A, Meyers had ample opportunity to use the locations available to her. However, she seems so in love with her tedious dialogue - and, believing we should be too - has her poorly-sketched characters blurt out every cliche in dreary interiors for the majority of the film. The Holiday is not only a rehash of every Richard Curtis movie, Meyers also recycles a scene from her previous film Something's Gotta Give when Diaz tries to cry while trying to write and it's this lazy, second-hand approach that is the film's most frustrating element. Diaz, Law and Black are all equally dreadful from start to finish and Winslet, who is slightly better, can't do much with the material she's dealt. It's not all bad, because for one second I thought I saw Kristin Davis lurking in the background, but it turned out to be someone else. A close call, that

Review by Gavin Burke