Friday, July 10, 2009
Half a Quartet is Enough
The Holiday, Starring Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Cameron Diaz, and Jack Black, Written and Directed by Nancy Meyers, Columbia Pictures Corporation, 2006For many men there is nothing so terrifying as your significant other returning from a trip to the video store without you, stack of movies in hand. All too often you can expect the usual bevy of chick flicks -- Sandra Bullock romantic comedies, sisterhood bonding family dramas, ill family members teaching us the true value of life, higher budget Lifetime movies and that sort of thing.
Handing me a stack of six DVDs she'd just picked out of the library, my wife had made her selections. They were divided into three for our daughter and three for ourselves. She started our strong with an appeal to me: Batman Begins. I'd actually fallen out of watching the Batman franchise after Tim Burton stopped making them, only reeled in by Heath Ledger's brilliant portrayal of the Joker in last year's Dark Knight. So despite being a big fan of Christopher Nolan's other films, I'd passed on this one before.
The second film began to move a little more in the girly direction, Juno, but I'd wanted to see this when it was at the theaters, to see if it deserved all the hype and to watch the ongoing, triumphant return of Jason Bateman who seemed so underused in the eighties.
Third and final big person film: The Holiday. Right away, I think I'm in trouble. Cameron Diaz who hasn't done anything worth watching since her What About Mary career high, and who is, to put it bluntly, a much more obnoxious and annoying Sandra Bullock. Same career trajectory, same oversized star recognition, same later career pushing out schlocky, badly written chick flicks.
Which is a weird way of telling you, that this was the movie I picked for us to watch that evening.
Go with my logic here. The other two movies I really did want to watch. But, it was late when we started (pushing past 11pm) and my wife has a tendency to fall asleep during any late starting film. I figured, I could watch the first twenty minutes of this film, then go do something else once slumber carried off my spouse. The other two films looked promising and I really have a hard time watching a film broken up into blocks. Late as it was, I had no anticipation of making it all the way through a whole movie.
In goes the DVD and we start watching. The opening scenes, an office holiday party at The Daily Telegraph in London were very promising actually. Kate Winslet plays Iris Simpkins, writer for the paper who is in love with Jasper Bloom, a caddish columnist played by Rufus Sewell. They've had an off-again-on-again strange relationship over the past three years, in no small part by the fact that Jasper is also dating another woman. The announcement at the party of Jasper's engagement to said other woman and Iris' assignment from the publisher to be the person covering this news event sends Iris home in tears.
Wonderful stuff. If there's an actress of Winslet's caliber working anywhere, please let me know, because she truly is amazing in every possible connotation of the word. Subtle, charming, elegant, real, engaging. I have yet to be disappointed in a single performance by Winslet.
And ... scene.
We next open on Ed Burns, as Ethan, waking on a couch in t-shirt and boxers. He walks through the house he's in to knock on the bedroom door of Amanda Woods, played by Cameron Diaz, and for a time the entire film goes straight into the toilet. This scene was almost enough for me to suggest we pull the DVD and look for something on PBS or Telemundo to better occupy our time. Isn't there a weeknight version of Sabado Gigante on? Anything? Please?
Because this is probably as good a piece of evidence for the utter lack of talent of Diaz as an actress as you're likely to get. She's ditzy, she is clearly "acting" and doing it badly, her lines are delivered as if memorized only minutes before, and her own actual personality as a major flake comes shining right on through. And one hit wonder Ed Burns does little to redeem himself here, his voice a persistent whine, his characterization limp. The whole scene goes on far too long, leans too heavily on cliches, and is filled with two horrible actors vying to outdo each other in awfulness.
At that moment, I sincerely hoped my wife would fall asleep. I had to escape this travesty. The whole scene had one bright shining moment and that was a cut-away shot to the gardener's face as he contemplates whether or not Ethan should own up to his infidelity. In a ten minute long scene, there was approximately one second that was not sheer hell.
But then we were back to Kate Winslet, and things improved immeasurably.
The movie conceit that gets the ball rolling here, you have to overlook. You simply have to. These two women end up meeting online through a house swapping service, and again, suspending disbelief permanently, you have to get past the sheer ludicrousness that without any kind of screening in place, without any kind of preparation, two strangers, one from Los Angeles and one from London would exchange homes with each other. Iris even abandons her dog to the care of this West Coast stranger.
But leave Iris does, ditching her charming little cottage and flying to Tinseltown where she finds herself astonished and agog at Amanda's palatial estate. Amanda, you see, works in Hollywood as a cutter of film trailers and she's been very, very successful at it. This sets up one of the film's nicest conceits in that Amanda finds her life being narrated by famed trailer voice Hal Douglas, her various avoidance stratagems picked apart as so much predictable movie fodder. "For Amanda Woods," we often hear in voice over, then some almost mocking summary of the story so far.
And in time-honored Hollywood tradition, Amanda finds British ways strange and foreign, the house cold at night from no central heating, driving on the opposite side of the road terrifying, etc. etc., while Iris opens like the flower she is in the California sun, her rainy British cloud lifting as long as Jasper keeps his distance.
Enter our male romantic leads.
Because, of course, you know what's going to happen, I know what's going to happen, my couch knew what was going to happen. What's at least a nice touch to the film is that while the broad strokes are as obvious and as expected as you may imagine, Nancy Meyers' screenplay at least throws in a few minor, very minor, curveballs.
Most prominently, we have Jude Law as Graham Simpkins in one of his warmest performances. He has always come off to me as rather like a female version of Tilda Swinton. Strange looking while still being attractive, a bit of a cold fish emotionally but intellectually you can see something very definitely going on behind his eyes. Here, he's a bit less guarded, a bit more interesting, and a bit friendlier. He shows up drunkenly on the doorstep of Iris' house, waking Amanda from sleep, and the two hit it off like gangbusters, ending up in bed by scene's end.
A bit overwrought and a bit hard to believe, as is much of this script, but Law manages to make it work mostly, and somehow his presence seems to have a calming effect on Diaz who settles down into an at least not horrifyingly annoying performance. When the two are together, his groundedness as an actor tethers Diaz's more air-headed performance tendencies and forces her to at least try to act if only out of competition.
Back stateside, Iris meets Miles, Jack Black, in a performance so restrained one can only imagine the director must have horse tranq'd him every morning prior to that day's shooting. A Hollywood score composer, Black gets to display his musical chops while off-handedly charming Iris. He's none too shabby at being the schlubby nice guy sort, though occasionally his eyes bug out a bit when the medication starts to wear off. When his own girlfriend situation goes south, Miles and Iris and nature almost takes its course. These two wounded parties are far more hesitant than the whirlwind of passion back in snowy England.
One of the more unexpected plot developments in the film is Iris befriending Arthur Abbot (Eli Wallach), a retired Hollywood screenwriter from the Golden Age of film. The two form a charming couple, Arthur teaching Iris about classic cinema and she giving him the confidence to finally attend a celebratory dinner in his honor and ditch his walker. There is much of the classic cinema in this that you can't help but be a bit charmed by it. The Iris plotline includes bits of old Hollywood scores in its music (pastiched together by Hans Zimmer), allusions to films (such as the Brief Encounter inspired grit in eye when Iris and Miles meet), among a host of others. Arthur even refers to he and Iris' initial introduction as a "meet cute," industry term for a wacky meeting of romantic leads.
Halfway through the film, late as it was, I was the one suggesting bed and a continuation of the film later. It's a slight piece of fluff, a pleasant enough wiling away of two hours, but nothing I couldn't live without seeing straight through. My wife urged me to stay for just one more scene and we finished the whole film.
And all in all, it wasn't bad.
Oh sure, it was stunningly predictable, whole swaths of complication in the Amanda and Graham storyline were just plastered over and left to the viewer's discretion, but all in all, The Holiday is a cheerful little effort. No one will win any awards for it, but no one will suffer too terribly in the watching of it either.
I'm not the kind of critic who insists that each piece of art actually be Art, but I at least expect talented craftsmanship and better than average technical proficiency. The Holiday manages this more often than not. I'm as surprised as anyone to say that I find myself rather actually liking the film, no doubt ably assisted by grand performances by the two British leads. As usual, they leave the Americans in the dust when it comes to quality acting, even in a thin entertainment such as this one.
# posted by The Critic @ 7/10/2009 11:10:00 AM
1 Gripe(s)
