A Tepid 2006 Rom-Com Has Unexpectedly Become This Year’s Most Contentious Christmas Movie
Holiday checklist time: You’ve sent out your cards. You’ve got your presents. You’ve made your travel arrangements. But there’s one last thing to take care of: Have you settled on the pointless Christmas movie fight you’re going to have this year?
The Die Hard thing has grown stale. I checked to see if there’s anyone out there who thinks Die Hard specifically isn’t a Christmas movie, and there is exactly one person: Bill Simmons. If that’s the company you want to keep, have at it.
And Love Actually? Do you think society hasn’t adjudicated to death whether that movie—celebrating its 20th anniversary this year!—is problematic, fatphobic, and bad, actually? It’s all been said, often very delightfully, but still, so many times.
You need a better low-stakes debate to wage with your family or significant other this year, and that is why I humbly suggest a new entry to the “dumb movies to fight about at Christmas” canon: The Holiday. You may have seen it before, given that it came out in 2006, but you may not have realized quite how perfect it is for this specific purpose. The Holiday, despite being on the surface a harmless rom-com that takes place at Christmas time, is actually surprisingly divisive.
The movie is also literally divisive, or at least divided, in the sense that it tells two parallel stories. To refresh your memory, The Holiday drops us into the lives of two unlucky-in-love women: Kate Winslet’s sad-sack Iris is an English newspaper writer who finds out the co-worker who’s been stringing her along for years has gotten engaged to another woman, while Cameron Diaz’s Amanda has a booming business editing movie trailers in L.A., but her boyfriend can’t handle her independence and Type A–ness, which leads to him cheating on her and them breaking up. Both feeling an itch to escape their problems and get out of town, the two women find each other online at a vacation rentals website, and then, after an instant message conversation where they act like it’s normal to read all your messages out loud, Amanda heads for Iris’ cozy cottage and Iris to Amanda’s sun-dappled mansion. In their new locations, each happens to meet a charming man, and then we’re off to the races.
When The Holiday first came out, consensus skewed negative: It was only a modest hit in theaters, and critics didn’t exactly embrace it, with reviews calling it “formulaic” and “flat.” But opinion has shifted more and more toward the positive over the years, as writer-director Nancy Meyers herself has acknowledged: In 2020, she told Vulture, “If anybody in 2006 in December, when that movie came out, told me 14 years later someone’s going to say, ‘When it’s December, you watch The Holiday’—what can I tell you? Time will tell. The audience is everything.”
Cut to this year, and we’ve got movie theaters hosting special screenings—at least one of which Diaz popped by—and outlets like Yahoo News running articles headlined, “Why Are Gen Z and Young Millennials So Obsessed With 00’s Rom-Com ‘The Holiday’?” The Yahoo piece poses a few answers to that question, from the plausible (like “aughts nostalgia,” which is definitely a big thing) to the less so (“astrological relevance” seems like a stretch), but doesn’t fully get to the bottom of it. Elsewhere in the content mines, listicles and pieces about The Holiday overfloweth: People is telling us where the cast is now, Vogue is calling Diaz’s movie wardrobe its “winter style inspiration,” Mashable loves the scene set in a Blockbuster, Refinery29 wants to argue about whether it’s a Christmas movie, someone baked a miniature version of one of the houses from the movie … and so on. It’s getting out of hand. Last year, there was a whole news cycle about how the movie wasn’t getting a sequel, despite fans’ clamoring.
But The Holiday isn’t universally beloved, and is in fact weirdly polarizing—I know this firsthand because, to out myself, I happen to be one of the people who doesn’t like it. It’s not because I don’t like this sort of thing—I am, on the contrary, very dorkily so into this sort of thing that earlier this year I took a class on the work of Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers. But The Holiday has always felt like two not-interesting-enough-to-be-their-own-movie stories grafted together to me, with stock characters who weren’t nearly as interesting as Meyers’ middle-aged protagonists. When it came time to discuss it in my class, I assumed everyone would be on the same page as me in considering it easily one of Meyers’ worst films. That wasn’t the case at all: Extremely smart people whose taste I respected spoke very convincingly about how much they adore this movie, to my utter bewilderment. They found its writing charming, they were moved by Iris’ friendship with the old man who turned out to be a screenwriter in Golden Age Hollywood, and they noted how perfectly it fit that Amanda, who hasn’t cried since her father left when she was a kid, winds up with a single father.
Their exaltations and the movie’s sizable online fandom notwithstanding, I don’t see it. To me (and the rest of what I assume is the silent Holiday majority out there), this movie is a nothingburger. But I can’t deny that others very much do see it, that to them it’s a somethingburger, and that’s what makes this movie a perfect candidate for fighting about with your loved ones. I’m telling you, I have a hunch that if you polled viewers on whether they like this movie, the results would be both unpredictable across normal party lines and swing state–level close. As a thread on Twitter (aka X) that got millions of views last week illustrated, people get up in arms about this movie, and some of the people picking the fights are the people who claim to love it most.
The twin storylines are key to this movie’s strength as an object of debate: They mean there’s double the things to disagree about. A common refrain is to say that you wish the movie was actually all one story, but strangely enough, this gets said about both narratives: For every person who claims they wish the movie was just Kate Winslet and Jack Black, there’s another one who says it would be better if they cut out Winslet and Black and the movie was only Diaz and Jude Law. You can also disagree about the levels of chemistry: Winslet and Black have none! No, it’s Diaz and Law who have none! And where Love Actually’s body-shaming is so passé, there’s a more subtle discussion to be had here concerning beauty standards: Are Winslet and Black supposed to be the more normal-looking and approachable couple here? Is that a knock on Winslet? Or is it a knock on Black to even suggest as much? I’m telling you: Endless matrices for disagreement!
After revisiting The Holiday to write about its elevation to Christmas movie fight classic, I still don’t like it, but I do appreciate it more. It’s not one of those paper-thin TV Christmas movies that get churned out nowadays. That it can withstand all these rewatches and arguments has to mean something about how it was built. In 2006, they still knew how to make bad movies that were also kind of good … or good movies that were also kind of bad, depending on how you see it. In any case, may The Holiday hold over you and yours until next year, when we can pick another movie to fight about.
