"The Holiday" (3 stars)

The conversation in the car this morning went like this

Me: I'm thinking about giving The Holiday 3 stars on my blog.

Attractive Wife: If you do that, you will lose the last remaining bit of credibility you have with the 2 people who read your blog.

Yet these are risks I'm willing to take. For while I was told that The Holiday was an emotionally manipulative waste of time, I had a pleasant experience watching it last night with the aforementioned lady friend. The movie has problems - many - but I'm feeling generous, and therefore give it a 3 star out of 4 stars.

The Holiday is a romantic comedy about two females (Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet) who have had their hearts broken by the men in their lives, and in response, find one another on a home exchange website and decide to spend Christmas holiday away from home. Diaz is a successful motion picture trailer advertiser, and lives in a large mansion in Los Angeles. Winslet is a journalist for The Telegraph and lives 40 minutes outside of London in an "idyllic" country home in a small village. Diaz wants to go somewhere where there are no men, and Winslet wants to kill herself, making the possibility of living in Los Angeles for two weeks an unexpected treat.

From there, the story goes just as you'd expect: Winslet and Diaz both find true love in their new surroundings. And the journey to that is both predictable and a bit sappy. There's a lot of problems with the way the plot accomplishes this. For one, there's the obvious emotional manipulations, as my friend said. You say Cameron Diaz has a snazzy one-night stand with apparent playboy, Jude Law, only to learn that the two women who keep calling his cellphone (Sophia and Olivia) are really just his two daughters from a previous marriage that ended, two years earlier, tragically leaving him a widower? Wow. Just kick me in the emotional gonads why don't you. There are many cutesy contrivances in the movie, of which this is but one, and they are heavy-handed meant to get the waterworks flowing. But I think this was probably the only way to get the audience engaged, because the second problem was in my mind much worse. Three of the four characters (Jack Black being the third) have all been unceremoniously cheated on or dumped by their romantic partners, and in two weeks' time find true love. This is a fairy tale, obviously, and it's sole purpose is to provide hope and comfort to everyone watching that there exists someone who is a much better match for them than the snakes they're currently with. The problem is not that they find true love so quickly, and so perfectly, in such a short amount of time, given their respective histories of always being with the worst people, but rather that they spend so much of the movie explaining to each other about how badly they've been treated. Since we learned immediately, in the first fifteen minutes, about the scoundrels in Diaz and Winslet's lives, it made it somewhat frustrating to have to listen to them explain their histories to the new people in their lives - whether it be their old friends, their new friends, their new lovers or the 90-year-old screenwriters who live next door. That was, I think, the fatal flaw in the movie - it was a talky movie in the most boring sense. I felt smothered by the dialogue.

So then, why do I give it three stars, and not two? I'm feeling generous. I'd probably give it a two and a half, on an average day, for the above mentioned reasons, but last night the movie had a bit of some pixie dust left in it that managed to win me over. First, I always enjoy watching people fall in love. That never gets old. And while these four didn't have Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan chemistry, they had enough. I thought Kate Winslet was exceptional in the way she communicated how pitiful and depressed her character was, just through her painfully awkward smiles at an office party when she learns her former lover has gotten engaged. Who hasn't felt that embarassment - the wanting to hide and just disappear, but socially required to remain in a room with everyone for at least another hour? If you have, then you know what she felt, and you can appreciate what a wonderful opportunity it is for her to run away for two weeks. I did get tired of Cameron Diaz, who plays her character as basically "cheerleader trying to be a 'powerful woman'", but mostly unsuccessfully. But, I still liked that she was falling in love.

The real movie within this movie was a story that is worth telling. It's an old Hollywood film about people growing into the people they are meant to be - independent people with integrity - through tragedy, and finding a loving, respectful partner in the process. Someone who understands them so well that it can undo the pain wrought by decades of mistreatment. Cameron Diaz, who hasn't cried since she was 15 when her father left her mother, finally cries when she leaves Jude Law in England, and then realizes that if she wants to be whole, she has to go back to him. Kate Winslet finds decency in a neighbor who appreciates who she is, and a new friend who stops by and makes her laugh.

Movies like these are fun for reflecting on how exactly to assign intermediate values on an ordinal scale. It's easy to give 3.5 or 4 stars, and it's easy to give 1-2 stars. But how do you assign values in the range of 2-3? These are mediocre films, but mediocre films vary in quality and achievement. My main reason for going with the 3 over the 2.5 is simple: in the world of a mediocre film, your emotional impression needs to be the thing that casts the deciding vote. And my emotional impression was slightly more positive than negative, given that this is already a mediocre achievement. It was not especially thought-provoking, but it had its moments, and those moments tended on average to balance out the things about the movie that didn't seem to work. I give it between a 2.5 and 3 stars, depending on my mood, which puts me in the range of USA Today (75) and TV Guide (63).