Will You Won't You Will You Won't You Won't You Join the Dance?

 Every so often I have to admit I'm beaten.

There's this movie that I've just watched for the third time without really intending to.

It's The Holiday, and on the surface there's a lot of unpromising things about it. The premise is so obvious as to shake your head (two women with shitty love lives due to shitty men in their lives do a vacation house swap between LA and Surrey England--and guess what happens?) and stars glossy Hollywood stars in pretty places. It has unbearably cute kids on one side of the Atlantic and an unbearably endearing old guy on the other. It's a Hollywood movie that smooches Hollywood (which can get embarrassing and is done entirely too much these days.) 

But my crusty populist alienation from people who are just too pretty playing supposedly ordinary folks, I found, was curiously absent watching Jude Law and Cameron Diaz. And the LA couple was only partially glossy, with Kate Winslet and Jack Black as the other couple. (Jack Black as a romantic lead?)

And Jude Law is not only Jude Law, but Too Good To Be True, a widower with the aforementioned adorable kids (the phone calls from other women? They're from them!) The movie could easily have gotten away with a divorce, but goes for the triple. And of course the endearing old man (Eli Wallach) is a living Hollywood legend with an Oscar on his windowsill who finally receives his just recognition. It's the piece of wedding cake with the rose on it.

And yet, and yet...Jude Law and Cameron Diaz are not improbable figures, and that mainly because they have all sorts of interesting, warm and above all disarming things to say to each other. Engaging, confessional, witty, but not too witty for the room. There's at least one time when Jude Law tries for witty (he'd been doing well so far) and it slips through his fingers. "Asking if you were unmarried was just a back-door way of--asking if you're married." and he realizes he's reached the city limits. In short, it's the writing.

It's not dazzling writing, it's careful writing. And that's the kind of miraculous thing about it. Jack Black (and it's a bit of assured expectation management that he's the first character you see in the film) is given a spare , restrained script, and Jack brings it off, by being given a part of a guy who's smart, talented, funny and decent--but who is aware every so often (not always) that he's a short, slightly pudgy guy in an environment of--well, Jude Laws. Too clever and he's Jack Black™, to pathetic and he's (as Eli Wallach puts it) the best friend and not the romantic lead.

There's a good panicky-crossed-signals incident at the critical point in the movie, a cute little narrative trick that is used just often enough (and that's twice) as treats to the viewer, smilers rather than laughers. All the energy of the script is poured into the romance. 

Looking at Nancy Meyers' previous career, I might have even given The Holiday a skip--I don't even remember Something's Gotta Give--and Father of the Bride I & II? What Women Want? The remake of The Parent Trap, for Lubitsch's sake? The best that could be said is that she's paid her dues. I'm tempted to say that she may have been sabotaged by casting--those who remember the original Father of the Bride with affection (I even have the original novel, with illustrations by the great Gluyas Williams) have got to rise up out of our rockers and say Steve Martin? What were you thinking? (Martin may be the Keanu Reeves of comedy--in the same way that, incomprehensibly, Reeves seems to be the first choice among producers of SF, Fantasy and Comics filmmaking, despite his inability to act his way out of San Dimas--Steve Martin seems to be, in their money and cocaine clouded minds, both Spencer Tracy and Peter Sellers. I liked his stand-up, but I'll swallow my tongue before I'll watch the new Pink Panther.) (and the less said about Mel Gibson the better.) Moreover, she produced them, so there's less excuse.

But it did, in fact seem to be dues paying, because here she chose exactly the stars she wanted and wrote them to near perfection. She couldn't have gotten that box office boffo a cast without those dues, nor the control to do this right. At the same time that it's sad that somebody has to go through that low arc, it's still warming to see someone come out the other side.

This film is not going to seduce you, I expect, if you have too much irony in your soul, or if you rebel against the genre in the first place. The Hollywood romantic comedy really is  its own thing: it's different from stage romance or farce, since the heart and soul of it is in the close-up, the two-shot, the deep familiarity the camera has with the small reactions of the actor's face. The romances of previous eras had to be done with big gestures, door slamming, and the falling in love part was the simplest of facts as the curtain falls. The Hollywood romantic comedy (and the best of its romantic drama, is made up of all the things that go between the grand gestures. As a result it seems more frothy and inconsequential, but it's really not--although it's easy to devalue. This movie says very little about L.A. or England, and the social forces are covered with a layer of chintz--and the message of the movie is Stop Going Out With Assholes, There Are Wonderful Guys Out There. (which has a certain appeal, I admit.)

But the work of romance is not to tell you that. The work is to make you believe it.

The truly great romances of the world can actually make you believe that the nature of the world really runs on Love--if you are young and still believe in the God or Goddess within you. It's too late for most of us, though: it's enough of a miracle to believe in it for the time that you've surrendered yourself to the movie, or book, or sonnet, and not for you, for them. And even in that reduced circle, it happens terribly seldom.

(I'll just mention one movie that, though passionately romantic in intent, left me with nothing but a tremendous bitterness, and that was Notting Hill. Julia Roberts, playing Julia Roberts, Hollywood Superstar, meets Hugh Grant, self-effacing semi-failure book shop owner. Despite the whole Two Different Worlds thing, they fall in love, and after the usual Daisy Method  (which The Holiday also uses: she-loves-me-she-loves-me-not), there's a Mad Dash To The Airport and Julia holds a press conference saying that she's abdicating her throne to be with The Man She Loves. (There's a Mad Dash at the end of The Holiday, and it goes on just a bit too long--mainly because it's on foot.))

(Nothing wrong with the plot--the failing of Notting Hill was that Julia Roberts fell in love with Hugh Grant because he was Hugh Grant. The writer/director/producer/stars just had it happen, an instantaneous thing that was done and complete at the first meet cute , and the rest was just admitting the fact. The real energy and charm was in the supporting cast, who would have been even more fun without the two big stars getting in the way. But the truth the creators tried to say is that Love Conquers All, and can bridge the gap from the highest of our present-day nobility and the nobody peasantry--and they didn't do a damn thing to make you believe it. They were perfectly happy with two movie stars falling in love with each other. And for me, while they essayed this great romantic truth, by abandoning the effort, they said exactly the opposite. I finished the movie and said out loud to myself, "It's a lie.")

The virtue of The Holiday is that, while it didn't quite convince me that it's Love that rules the universe, it did manage to convince me that I would like these people up on the screen if I met them, that they are worthy of my sympathy, and that they well deserve whatever happiness they get. It's very simple idea--but just try it sometime.

It really takes a great deal of confidence to have the climax of the movie simply to have the cast of the movie (minus the villains and the old guy in the walker) simply dancing around. And it takes a great deal of care and skill to make that both necessary and sufficient as an ending.