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The Holiday

The second in a trifecta of utterly blandly titled movies for Meyers is The Holiday, Meyer’s biggest critical and financial blemish. It is both her lowest grossing and least enjoyable film to date, though it isn’t an outright disaster in either category.

All of Meyer’s movies involve “rich people problems,” but The Holiday is the most egregious on that front and does the least to help us mere financial mortals to relate. We are asked to sympathize with the lonely plights of two women who are down on love. These two women swap homes from glitzy Beverly Hills to sleepy, small town England. In case you didn’t see it coming, both women have trouble adapting to their new settings, then they meet the men of their dreams, and somehow, even with transcontinental lives, everyone makes it work for a happy ending. But the woes of Cameran Diaz’s and Kate Winslet’s love lives aren’t sympathetic enough. The film does win points for a surprisingly loveable performance by Jack Black and for having an awesome B-storyline about an aging screenwriter played by the wonderful Eli Wallach. I would have happily scratched the beyond implausible storyline of Diaz falling for Jude Law in a small London suburb for increased minutes with Wallach’s soft spoken wisecracker of a character.

The Holiday continues Meyer’s’ tradition of featuring incredible eye candy, which helps make this vacation far more watchable than the plot itself. Everyone is good looking (even Black seems less rotund then usual here). The mansion in Beverly Hills is spacious and there’s some transcendent pleasure in watching Winslet lay in what must be the most comfortable bed of all time and learn how to bring down the blackout shades to sleep for endless hours while recovering for jetlag. We all wish our bedrooms could induce that kind of coma.

On the weekend of December 8, 2006 the Holiday had a disappointing third place opening of just under $13 million. The only other “big” opener was Apocalypto, so the step backwards for Meyers had to have disappointed Sony somewhat. Holiday inflation inflated The Holiday enough to get to a respectable $63 million cume. Not an embarrassing figure, but still a full 50% pay cut from her previous effort. The key, though, is that international audiences also eat up Meyers' stuff. This one earned a huge $142 million overseas, seriously picking up the slack. The Holiday also remains a popular rental option and made a killing in the home video market. The beauty of these films, again, is that you get to kind of, sort of, live vicariously through the glamorous lives the main characters, who become relatable because they struggle with love and stuff too! Those are tropes that folks are willing to retry every holiday season from now until eternity.

It's Complicated

With her most recent feature, Meyers went back to the love lives of the older set. The aptly, simply, and stupidly titled It's Complicatedfollows a woman, Meryl Streep, who falls for her ex-husband, Alec Baldwin. That’s already complicated enough, but add in three confused children, the fact that Baldwin’s remarried, and another suitor for Streep played by the casually goofy Steve Martin, well…then it really gets complicated.

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