Jingle bell schlock

It's good to be genetically perfect: Amanda Woods (Cameron Diaz) catches the fancy of her best friend's brother, Graham (Jude Law), in The Holiday. (Sony Pictures)

The Holiday is a cornucopia of cute: cute girls and cute guys on cute furniture solving cute issues. Hence, Cameron Diaz had to star, or else the planet would have collapsed in on itself, consuming all in a fiery blaze.

Billy Wilder, pioneer of the American romantic comedy, liked a little wicked with his warmth, but the modern rom-com, especially under the Kiehls-lotioned hand of Holiday writer-director Nancy Meyers, is a catalogue fantasy of beautiful things and people (and Jack Black). Catalogues are fun, but they don’t usually plumb the troubled heart, which should be the quiet goal of any good movie romance.

Diaz plays Amanda, an L.A. movie-trailer mogul (who knew there was money in that?) who can’t keep a man, as evidenced by hoofed cheater Ed Burns getting showered with his Abercrombie wardrobe from the balcony. Meanwhile, in London, Kate Winslet, amping up her adorability, is Iris, a high-profile wedding columnist (who knew there was money in that?) hopelessly in love with her manipulative, engaged ex-boyfriend, played by sexy-ugly Rufus Sewell.

Cute attracts cute, even around the globe, and the two women decide to mend their broken spirits via a transatlantic getmeouttahere Christmas house swap. In a terrible exposition scene that’s become irritatingly common in the digital age, we watch while the two meet via Google. Each reads aloud her Instant Messages as she types: “When…can…you…come? Hit send …” As soon as I see someone in a film surfing the web or hear that little e-mail ping, I think of work and feel instantly stressed. No one has figured out yet how to make computers come alive on screen.

Thanks to the miracle of technology, Amanda makes her way to Iris’s charming Rosehill Cottage in Surrey, a place so shire-y and sweet that one expects to open the door to find Frodo, Peter Rabbit and Laura Ashley taking tea together at the fireside. Since this is a movie that’s really about set dressing, Meyers smartly goes broad, appealing to a wide range of decorating magazine aficionados: The fussy frillies will love the English cottage with its claw-foot tub and exposed beams, and the modern downtown girl will love the L.A. mansion with its electronic blinds and Philippe Starck footstools.

Anglo-American relations: British journalist Iris Simpkins (Kate Winslet) and American film composer Miles (Jack Black) find love in The Holiday. (Sony Pictures)

The homes come with men, too. In Surrey, Iris’s brother Graham (Jude Law) shows up drunk one night and he and Amanda have plane-ticket sex that turns into something more meaningful. In L.A., Iris meets two men: a quirky film composer named Miles (Jack Black) and Arthur, an elderly screenwriting legend (played with grace by Eli Wallach). Arthur becomes a friend, encouraging Iris to unleash her inner moxy like the grand old dames of cinema. Meanwhile, he remains another neutered old man in the ninth circle of movie hell where aging actors play poker with the cast of Cocoon.

Meyers isn’t entirely off base by trying, a little presumptuously, to align her modern chick flicks with the woman-centred screwball comedies of yesteryear. Winslet does have a touch of Rosalind Russell, and Meyers – who co-wrote Baby Boom and Private Benjamin with her husband, Charles Shyer – as always attempts to add a little feminist heft to her synthetic offerings. As in her far-weightier recent hit, the Diane Keaton-Jack Nicholson vehicle Something’s Gotta Give, Meyers’s Holiday heroines struggle to find men who will accept their professional achievements, and not just because wedding columnist and movie trailer mogul are sort of ridiculous jobs. Amanda and Iris deserve better, and they can have it all, dammit!

In accordance with this second-wave feminist fantasy, the male characters Meyers crafts are truly dreamy: sensitive, unthreatened, most in love with a woman when she’s strongest and loudest. Jude Law, who has been trying too hard lately, is a great ideal boyfriend who is not what he seems; put a pair of glasses on the guy and his pretty looks gain just enough gravity to make him worth lusting. Jack Black is scrubbed clean for his normal guy debut and though he puts ironic quotes around too many lines, he and Winslet have genuine chemistry.

It seems pointless to complain of The Holiday’s planet-sized plot holes – Christmas day itself is weirdly absent – or Meyers’s lazy recourse to tired chick-flick conventions. A single, 30-something woman playing air guitar with a pillow is humiliation, not entertainment. The line: “I want to eat carbs without wanting to kill myself!” should never be uttered by someone an audience is supposed to find likeable. And people on first dates don’t montage-frolic in topiary gardens.

These throwaway moments weaken a film that aspires to something better. Winslet is such a good actor that even delivering a generic monologue about falling out of love, she can lodge a sizeable lump. Diaz has a harder time elevating the material. Her foot stomping and hair flipping is not becoming more flattering with age; it looks better on my one-year-old daughter.

Still, The Holiday operates on a register we know so well that it’s a comforting diversion. It may give you some seasonal shopping ideas, too. If not exactly a Christmas classic, The Holiday is an un-unique snowflake: enjoyable, pretty and forgotten.

The Holiday opens Dec. 8.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for cbc.ca.

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