Category: Film Review

Scrooge (1935)

Review Essay

Welcome to the first of these A Christmas Carol adaptation reviews, which will appear on the blog each Sunday.  I’m sure any of us who love Christmas movies have a favorite Carol, and part of what inspired me to start this project in the first place was my own affection for a couple of particularly wonderful Christmas Carol adaptations.  As you’ll see below, the categories and scoring system will work somewhat differently than the regular reviews, which I hope you’ll enjoy as a little variation.  I’ll note, too, that this story is so universally well known, and the details I want to talk about stretch so fully through the film, that these Christmas Carol film reviews will be MUCH higher on spoilers.  To me, talking about Scrooge’s redemption arc is about as much of a “spoiler” as telling someone the Titanic is going to hit an iceberg and sink (apologies if that just ruined James Cameron’s film for you), but I wanted you to be forewarned about that approach.  Okay, on with the show.

For my first Christmas Carol on the blog, I just had to go with the oldest feature film version of the story that has sound (I’ll probably take on a silent film version someday, if this blog persists beyond this first quixotic holiday season).  There’s more than one version of the 1935 Scrooge, though, so to be clear, I watched the movie in its original full length version, in black and white: there’s a shorter, colorized version of this film that was created a few years later for American school children, and that’s the one you’ll more frequently see on streaming services.  Whichever one you watch (I’ve seen both versions), the surviving print of this film is in bad shape, with lots of cracks and pops, and a wobbly and sometimes fuzzy or murky image.  Someday we need a nice, clean version (which I know we now have the digital tools to create), but goodness knows when one will be produced — the free market has no shortage, after all, of Christmas Carol movies!

A poster for the 1935 film, Scrooge, the title of the film is written in large red letters. Just below it, Ebenezer Scrooge glares off to his left under long white eyebrows. Beneath Scrooge we see Fred and Clara, and beside and above him (and the title) is Bob Cratchit, carrying Tiny Tim on his back.

There’s a definite attempt at realism in this version of the story — the band playing in the street outside Scrooge & Marley is just as out of tune as one would have been in real life, I’m sure, and inside the office itself we see that Scrooge’s desk and work look very little different from Bob Cratchit’s, as might well have been the case for someone as dedicated to miserhood as Ebenezer was.  The portrayal of Scrooge by Seymour Hicks is much more infirm and physically shaky: he seems both closer to the grave and more frail (and less intimidating) than in a lot of other approaches I’ve seen.  But being less imposing doesn’t make him less malicious: to the contrary, this adaptation is a lot more personal in his jabs at Bob, asking him about his family before reminding him of how painful it would be to lose his salary.

We see a little more of a montage after the end of the workday than sometimes appears in a Carol — scenes evoking lots of Christmas energy and spirit, including the Lord Mayor’s Christmas toast to the Queen which I think I’ve never seen in another Carol.  Also this version does show us Scrooge eating dinner in a tavern (alone, and dining on a pretty meager feast), which further extends the passage of time before the supernatural invades the plot.  I’d say the integration of the supernatural here is, in fact, a bit shaky — Scrooge doesn’t react aloud to the Marley doorknob effect, so that any viewer unfamiliar with the story (there have to be a few of them left in the world, don’t there?) wouldn’t really know what’s up.  He’s silent, too, in searching the house, which nevertheless he does do on camera, and slowly — arguably suspense is building for the audience, but to me this dragged a bit.  A really fun choice, though, is made in depicting Marley as invisible — Scrooge can see him, but we can’t.  So we see Scrooge’s horrified response to a ghost we only hear, and we watch as the camera pans slowly as though following Marley around the room — it’s eerie, and probably a lot more effective at spooking us than whatever practical “ghost” effect they might have tried would be.

Less successful, to me, are the depiction of the three spirits: Christmas Past is neither diminutive nor someone who pulls him to the window, and Christmas Present is neither large nor quite jovial enough, for my taste.  (Yet to Come is harder to screw up, and this film’s shadowy depiction was fine, I thought.)  It was odd to see a Carol that doesn’t show any of Scrooge as a younger man, but Christmas Past jumps only to him as a middle-aged moneylender, foreclosing on some poor people and enraging his fiancee (Scrooge’s childhood isn’t in EVERY adaptation, but is there another one that, like this film, also skips Fezziwig’s party?).  Unfortunately, as I’ll observe at more length below, this takes away a little of the film’s power.  

The Christmas Present section is more successful, to me — the Cratchit family antics are joyful and ring true, and I think there’s something novel and plausible here about Bob’s comments to his wife about Tiny Tim (which suggest to me a man who’s just unnerved enough by some of his little son’s words that he worries about him). Let’s face it, Tiny Tim’s a soul so old that any parent might find him a challenge, which this adaptation leans into, making his “God bless us, every one” into less an exuberant cheer and more a wistful hope.  The adaptation does manage a nice if brief version of the montage through a lot of nameless folks keeping Christmas in their way, before installing us at Fred’s.  The scene just does carry off the explanation of why Fred doesn’t resent Scrooge, but I’m afraid it doesn’t linger long enough to convey the real fun of that gathering, to me.

The Yet to Come sequence, as I mentioned earlier, does a fine job with the shadowy Ghost, but much of the rest of it feels a little off to me.  The ragpicker scene is weirdly staged, seemingly due to the director’s conviction that it would be a lot more unsettling (and less dull) than I found it, and we get a glimpse of an unidentified dead body (Scrooge’s, surely) that doesn’t pay off.  The Cratchit family scene is as affecting as always, but the graveyard scene that follows is tonally very weird: the music sounds like an action sequence as opposed to a heartbreaking revelation, and Scrooge’s wrestling with the spirit feels both forced and aimless.  Also a bit rote is Scrooge’s joy at the finale, though it’s fun to see Hicks transform his Scrooge into someone with a bit more energy.  I’d wish for a Christmas Day a little lighter on “business” — there’s too much to-do with how exactly to order and deliver a turkey — and heavier on the emotional journey he’s made, but his connection with Fred and Clara gets there, in the end.  And I do love any Carol that leaves in a little of Scrooge having fun at Bob’s expense, so I was pleased to see it here, and Hicks does a fine job as the reformed Scrooge “playing” at being cantankerous.  Scrooge joining the Cratchits at church is, I think, another singular element in this adaptation, and it’s where it concludes.

I Know That Face: There’s not a lot of connections to be made here (that I can find), but I think it’s really remarkable that Seymour Hicks, who of course plays the title character here, had somehow also played Ebenezer Scrooge over two decades earlier, in the 1913 short film entitled Scrooge.  If I ever do watch a silent film version of A Christmas Carol, maybe that’s the one I should pick.

Spirit of Christmas Carol Present: This section, which celebrates the inclusion of elements from the novella that are often cut out, could be long for any traditional adaptation like this one, but I’ll just note a couple of highlights.  I always like Martha Cratchit hiding playfully from her dad, and I think this adaptation pulls off the fun in that scene (and all it implies about Cratchit family fun) really well.  And I think the montages were unusually and marvelously inclusive of the story’s smaller details — I’m thinking especially of the Lord Mayor (who, again, is in a single sentence early in the story) toasting Queen Victoria and then, much later, Christmas Present taking Scrooge to a Christmas celebration at a lighthouse (which comprises a slightly longer and lovely scene in the book). 

Spirit of Christmas Carol Absent: This section, which denounces foolish exclusions from the original written version of the story, could be equally long here.  I’ll just note in particular that the loss of both Scrooge’s boyhood and Fezziwig messes up the story pretty fiercely — Dickens does a fine job in just a couple of scenes to establish that Scrooge is a man profoundly affected by the trauma of his lonely upbringing (and probably a harsh, if not abusive, father), and that he nevertheless once had the capacity to at least enjoy Christmas generosity when it was doled out by someone as relentlessly merry as his master, Fezziwig.  The idea that within this withered old miser there’s both a child who can be healed and a reveler ready to dance a jig is hard enough to sustain WITH those two scenes, and it’s basically impossible to envision without having either one.

Christmas Carol Vibes (8.5/10): Any attempt at a “straight” adaptation is going to score pretty high, and I’ll admit, especially when I consider the practical limitations of both sound recording and visual effects in this mid-1930s, I think this really captures the vibe of the book well for big portions of its running time.  Sure, I am frustrated with choices in the Christmas Past section (and I think a couple choices in Yet to Come are just weird), but when I think of all the ways this story’s been scrambled and reconfigured and borrowed from, I think this is a solid entry in the long list of Christmas Carol adaptations.  That list’s long enough, though, that there’s plenty to be mentioned above this one in terms of connection with the story, too.

Actual Quality (7.5/10): I mean, I’m still trying to cut this film some slack for its era, but I can’t deny — the quality of the print exacerbates the problems with the film’s already murky and sometimes aimless visual language.  I’ll talk about the actors below, but I’ll just say that in general there’s good but not great work being done here; the screenplay has some strange omissions (and welcome additions, to be sure), and the direction is really mannered and sometimes much too stiff.  It hangs together as a film due to the power of this story, which is so good it’s almost impossible to make something bad out of it, but the seams show throughout.

Scrooge?

Every Carol adaptation depends a lot on its version of Scrooge, so what of this one?  Well, Seymour Hicks plays the bitter, warped old man better than the reformed saint, who feels more deranged than human — I fear that Hicks, who by this time had been playing the role on stage for more than thirty years, had just aged to the point that it was tough to have the full range the part really demands.  But it’s not a bad performance by any stretch, and you can see the seeds of later performers here without question: some of Hicks’s physical gestures and line readings are very clearly either being borrowed or being given an homage by later actors, and that’s praise of a meaningful kind.

Supporting Cast?

The movie is brief enough and lingers enough in weird moments that only a couple of actors in the cast really get the chance to leave an impression.  Robert Cochran’s Fred is pretty successful as a guy you can believe would honestly both invite his awful uncle to dinner and laugh about it when the old goat doesn’t turn up.  Donald Calthrop as Bob Cratchit is a little more limited, but there’s a sweetness and a piety to him here that works within this particular adaptation — he’s less timid than some other Cratchit performances, too, so he’s not an outlier in that sense.  I do think it’s a bit of a mark against the rest of the cast that they just don’t linger — I really ought to have strong feelings about either Christmas Past or Present, and to have something to say about Tiny Tim, or Mrs. Cratchit, or Marley, all of which are often really memorable turns in other films.  I do blame some of this on the screenplay, but only some of it.

Recommended Frequency?

The 1935 film Scrooge is absolutely worth a one time watch, especially if you love A Christmas Carol — it’s laying some groundwork that I do think you’ll see in a lot of later versions, especially with the character of Scrooge himself.  But it’s hard to find a good quality version of the film, and even at its full length it feels a bit choppy and hasty — I’d be very surprised if it was anyone’s favorite version of the story.  I am willing to think, though, that a couple of its scenes just might be the best versions of those particular moments from the story: if you’re a big enough fan of the tale, this one would be an important element in getting a “completionist” perspective on it.

Finding the original black and white version of this film streaming is a little challenging.  Tubi has the shorter, colorized version, as do both Pluto and Plex.  (If you don’t know those three free services, by the way, they’re a great source of more obscure and older films — yes, with ad breaks, but they’ve got to pay bills somehow, and you can spend the ad breaks re-reading my review in delighted awe.  Okay, or you can just use that time to go down rabbit holes in IMDB; that’s what I’d do, honestly.)  Even Amazon Prime has the shortened, colorized version.  The only place I found the black and white original cut of the film was on YouTube — for those of you who are fastidious about copyright protection, you can be comforted that, to the best of my knowledge, the movie has fallen into the public domain.  You can buy the black and white original on DVD, too, from Amazon, and my hope is that some libraries carry the DVD, but Worldcat is down right now, so I can’t post a link to give you more information about that (I’ll update this whenever I next get the chance).

Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey (2020)

Review Essay

I’ll acknowledge at the outset that most Christmas films that latch onto our hearts (to any degree) are films we encountered via childhood — our own, the childhood of those around us, or the child that lingers within as we age.  I say that just because I’m about to be a little gentler to this movie than I suspect it may deserve, but that’s because it’s a film I have only ever seen in the company of my delightful kid, for whom it is a “Christmas classic” at this point because she’s seen it annually for about as long as she can remember.  Also, that first year that she and I watched it together, it was the pandemic year — we’d been largely confined to our house for months and months, and the holidays ahead of us were about to be conducted really entirely on Zoom.  So the exuberance and the physicality of this film landed a little more soundly, for me, because I was feeling that vulnerability and sadness that the pandemic brought with it — I was ready to feel like a kid alongside her.

Exuberance and physicality are really the hallmarks of Jingle Jangle, a Netflix film that attempts that trickiest of endeavors — creating a new fairy tale, something that feels like you’ve heard it all your life even though you never have before.  The two undeniably powerful things about the movie are its costumes and its production design: every single moment you’re watching, the screen is popping with vibrance and detail and a charisma that can’t be denied.  Even if you don’t love the movie you’re watching, I find it really hard to believe you wouldn’t want to walk down that street, or into that toy shop.  It’s a world worth seeing, then, and one that’s both tapping into an old school Victorian Christmas spirit and turning it upside down with the diversity of its humanity, and with the not-very-Victorian energy of modern pop and hip hop music and dance.

Movie poster for Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey. Journey, the film's child star, is a young Black girl in the foreground, smiling in a red coat and standing with arms wide and looking upward. Behind her left shoulder is a floating gold robot with large eyes. In the background,the crowded shelves of an eccentric toy store are visible.

I know, I know, it’s the third paragraph and I haven’t touched the plot yet — well, folks, the plot’s the piece of the movie I have the hardest time defending.  I mentioned the “new fairy tale” idea earlier, and I think that’s the best way to understand the movie — so much of it really wouldn’t make sense in a realistic world where there’s any consistency at all, but the logic of fairyland is famously a little less reliable.  Here’s the premise: Jeronicus Jangle, a brilliant toy inventor, has a wife and child and a great life, until one day, after achieving his greatest invention yet, his assistant (Gustafson) who feels overlooked and neglected steals both the invention and Jeronicus’s book of inventions and creates a brand new toy empire.  Jeronicus is ruined, and soon loses everything — his store’s a shambles, his wife dies, he alienates his brilliant inventor daughter.  But then HER daughter, a girl named Journey who is an inventor herself, decides to go visit her grandfather for Christmas basically unannounced.  Will the chipper enthusiasm and open-hearted love of a little girl warm the bitter old man’s heart?  Will Gustafson’s theft of Jangle’s inventions finally come back to haunt him?  Will there be a singing widowed postal worker who serenades Jeronicus on the daily with her three backup singers chiming in like Gladys Knight and the Pips?  Uh….yeah, yes is the answer to all three of those questions.  Jingle Jangle is kind of a wild ride sometimes.

So, basically everything about the plot really is cuckoo bananas — there’s just no reasonable way Gustafson could have gotten away with his theft when Jeronicus could simply have reported it, nor is there any real explanation other than “it happened” for how Jeronicus suddenly was unable to remember or recreate literally any of the inventions he’d come up with previously, let alone create anything new.  And sure, I could excuse those elements as “magical” except this is ALSO a script that later treats the theft of inventions as something the local constabulary treats really seriously with the administration of swift justice.  That same script wants me to believe that Jeronicus was unable to make any good inventions at all after Gustafson’s betrayal….except for the single exception of an adorable flying, talking robot that puts basically all his other ideas to shame.  Again, I guess, magic?  I don’t know — there’s also a massive logical flaw in the frame tale that surrounds this fairy story, but I really don’t want you to think about the plot that much, it’s not what the movie’s for.

The movie’s for so many other things — the aforementioned brilliant costumes, props, and sets.  Some really excellent acting performances show up on screen: I mean, sure, this isn’t the best work ever by either Forest Whitaker or Keegan-Michael Key but the two of them are fun to watch even when they’re working with a pretty basic script.  The music, with John Legend doing some co-writing and Usher showing up for the end credits, is definitely an asset, also.  And there’s just no denying that, in a genre that tends to skew lily white, there’s something truly fantastic about seeing a full cast of Black performers — major roles, minor ones, extras — in outlandishly lovely Victorian costume on snowy cobbled streets, showing off their skills as dancers and singers and overall performers.  White kids have gotten to grow up watching Danny Kaye and Vera-Ellen in White Christmas, after all, or the showy musical performances in the 1970 adaptation of Scrooge, and it makes me glad that other kids can grow up seeing folks who look like themselves and their families, spreading some holiday cheer.  Heck, I’m glad my White kid is getting that opportunity – that Christmas joy for her will be a more multicultural and multiracial experience than the world my generation grew up with.  I wouldn’t just give a pass to any film that came along with a diverse cast, to be sure, but there’s more than enough good things going on here for me to be willing not to think too hard about how exactly the story unfolds.

I Know That Face: Hugh Bonneville, one of the few non-Black performers in the main cast, appears as Mr. Delacroix here (sort of investor in / landlord for Jeronicus, it seems?), and also appears as the narrator in Silent Night: A Song for the World, a kind of docudrama re-enacting the writing of the Christmas hymn.  Lisa Davina Phillip, who for me steals every scene she’s in as the postwoman Ms. Johnston, also appears as Auntie Valerie in Boxing Day, a romantic comedy in which a British writer brings his American fiancee home to the UK for Christmas to meet his eccentric family (stay tuned for more on that one).  And Anika Noni Rose, who here plays the adult daughter of Jeronicus, appeared as a choir member back in 2004 in Surviving Christmas, the film in which an unpleasant billionaire hires a family to spend the holiday with him. Hoo boy, it’s hard not to make some political commentary about that one, but it’s only day two of the blog, maybe I can let some pitches go by, eh?

That Takes Me Back: A child’s reference to “The Jangleater 2000” took me back to when calling something a “2000” sounded futuristic and cool — what do kids say these days?  3000, maybe, since Buddy gets to be the Buddy 3000?  Also, this movie takes place at a time when rich and powerful people could still be held accountable by the legal system….oh, sorry, is that too dark for you? Guess James couldn’t hold it back after all: look, folks, it’s 2024, I can’t pretend not to be paying attention to the world, even if the goal here is more escapism than activism.

I Understood That Reference:  In the film’s prologue, before she spins her (highly unlikely) story, Grandma’s asked by one of her unnamed grandchildren if she’ll read them The Night Before Christmas, though she deflects the request since “it’s time for a new story”.  (Okay, Grandma, I’m picking up the subtext of race in that remark, and you’re right — that’s what I like about this movie, that instead of retreading the old Christmas tales, it’s presenting something different.)

Holiday Vibes (7.5/10): While the story is less about Christmas and more about the fantastical adventures of Journey, this has so many of the 19th Century trappings that, between A Christmas Carol and Currier & Ives lithographs, we associate with nostalgic holiday celebrations and wintry scenes of yore — mechanical toys and rich Victorian costuming and horses clopping along on cobblestones, etc.  This will press plenty of festive buttons, if you’re coming to it looking for those feelings.

Actual Quality (7.5/10): Again, the plot is bonkers: we cannot think about it at all.  But plot’s not the only thing a movie is made of.  If I just focus on the settings and costumes, the music and the acting, the overall feel of this movie?  I’m having a very fun time with it — and if I’m watching it alongside my 5th grader, add at least a full point to this rating, you know?  I know the film’s got plenty of issues, but I’m so darn glad it exists.

Party Mood-Setter? This is a perfect role for this movie to play, since at the low level of attention of “it’s on while we’re wrapping presents” or what have you, all the movie’s best stuff is still going to shine through aggressively, and the weaknesses of its overall structure are going to be less visible.  I’d highly recommend giving it a try in that setting.

Plucked Heart Strings? I think for a child audience, it might land the punches it wants to throw.  As an adult viewer, the plot ends up being silly enough that I can’t really take the problems of Jeronicus (or anybody else) seriously enough to feel actually tearful, but I certainly care about the characters, and that’s a testament to the things that are working here.

Recommended Frequency: This is an annual movie for me, in part because it’s one of my daughter’s top 5 holiday movies of all time (I asked her for a ranking).  I think it easily offers enough in the way of charm and color and energy to be worth it every year, and with each passing year, I get more accustomed to its weird plot, so that the ways in which it doesn’t work are less noticeable or problematic for me now. Again, I think you should give it a whirl, and I think it’s fine if it’s just something you’ve put on in the background while you construct a Yule log out of gingerbread or make homemade eggnog or whatever fun holiday practices you engage in.

This time around, there’s only one place I can steer you: if you want to watch Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey, as a Netflix movie, it is unavailable on any streaming service or rental/purchase service other than Netflix itself.

The Holiday (2006)

Review Essay

The Holiday’s a Nancy Meyers film through and through — and if you’re someone who knows those movies (What Women Want; Something’s Gotta Give; the 1990s Father of the Bride reboot films, which she screenwrote), you know a little bit about what you’re in for.  Lush interiors, especially really lavishly appointed kitchens; romantic/comedic dialogue that owes a zippy debt to Nora Ephron even if it’s rarely quite as stylishly composed; a willingness to take the emotion of a scene more than a little over the top.  This movie hits those marks reliably, and as a result is, to me, both reliably entertaining for a big chunk of its runtime and also a little too artificial and hollow to really land the punches it’s swinging for.

The premise is simple enough — Cameron Diaz’s Amanda and Kate Winslet’s Iris are both on serious rebounds after painful romantic fallouts that have left them questioning their own identities.  They find each other via a wonderfully hokey of-its-2006-era home swap website, and agree that Amanda will spend Christmas in a charming Surrey cottage while Iris spends her Christmas in a sprawling SoCal McMansion, buffeted by the Santa Ana winds.  They’re hoping not to find love, of course, which is why it’s so convenient when Iris’s brother Graham (played by Jude Law) drops in to find Amanda unexpectedly in residence at the cottage, and when Amanda’s ex’s buddy, Miles (played by a charmingly baby-faced Jack Black), shows up to retrieve some things and encounters an unanticipated English woman on holiday.  The rest….well, you know the rest, probably, though there’s a twist or two I won’t reveal.

The film poster for the movie, The Holiday, featuring the names and faces of the movie's four principal actors, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, and Jack Black.

The film’s at its best when it’s not trying to advance the primary plot, which is Diaz and Law falling in love — two incredibly attractive humans at basically the height of their Hollywood stardom, but underwritten in ways I’ll get to in a moment.  The absolute best pairing in the movie, by contrast, is actually Kate Winslet’s Iris and her new neighbor, a frail old screenwriter who was big in the mid-20th Century but now gets lost walking down the street – a man named Arthur, played spiritedly by Eli Wallach, who was 91 at the film’s release.  Iris and Arthur are incredible pals, and his not-so-secret desire to lift her self-esteem and make her see herself as a sassy screwball heroine with “gumption” is maybe the sweetest part of the film – both romantic and comedic without being rote.  Meyers’s eye for exterior shots, especially in the English countryside, is really excellent, so there’s a lot of cinematic beauty here to enjoy at times when all we’re seeing is establishing shots or montages.

The two main pairings are underserved by the film in different ways.  Winslet and Black are honestly very cute together – Miles is a sweet, decent fellow who, when the “Jack Black” within him is dialed down to 85% or lower, is impossible not to like, and Winslet’s character is developed really successfully (I think the emotional richness of the Arthur subplot helps her a ton in this regard, plus Iris is just given a more sympathetic situation in the screenplay to begin with).  The problem with their subplot is that it’s given short shrift by a movie that’s more interested in Diaz and Law — Miles and Iris get a couple of really nice scenes together, but that’s about it, and the romance as a result feels a little hasty.  The challenge with Amanda and Graham, meanwhile, is connecting with them: Graham’s character has the biggest twist, and while the revelation we get about him really adds substance to his character, it’s also hard to reconcile all the pieces of the guy we’ve been introduced to with the person he apparently is?  Jude Law is, again, so hot in 2006 that even this straight dude can appreciate the man’s cheekbones, but in some ways that makes him harder to see as anything but a movie star in the spotlight.  And poor Cameron Diaz is handed, in Amanda, a character who never really feels like a person to me — she’s all screenwriting quirks and problems, and most of the moments that are meant to provide emotional depth for her end up seeming flat or unrealistic to me.  Diaz has been good in other things, but here I think the material’s not strong enough to let her succeed, or else maybe she’s not quite strong enough (unlike Winslet) to elevate it.  Maybe both.  There are still, for sure, some good moments for Diaz and Law, especially later in the film where we’re seeing a life that’s a lot less artificial and flashy.  In the end, though, I found myself rolling my eyes or checking my watch too often when one or both of them was on screen.

I Know That Face: In this category, there’s a couple of people with fun crossovers into holiday movie territory.  The aforementioned Eli Wallach, Amanda/Iris’s charming elderly next door neighbor Arthur, narrated The Gift of the Magi in 1958 — a TV movie you probably didn’t see, unless you were around in 1958, I’m guessing — and appeared as a character named Behrman in a segment called “The Last Leaf” in another TV movie, O. Henry’s Christmas, that, yeah, you probably didn’t see unless you were watching television in 1996 (I was, but I don’t remember this one: you can apparently watch a terrible transfer of the whole thing on YouTube right now).  Arthur’s Hanukkah buddy, Ernie, is played by Bill Macy (no, not William H. Macy….an older actor who, I presume, is part of the reason there’s an “H.” in William H. Macy, given Screen Actors Guild rules about having distinctive working names) who also plays a character named Doo-Dah in Surviving Christmas, yet another semi-forgotten 2000s holiday flick, and one I’ve never seen.  Shannyn Sossamon, who plays Miles’s crappy girlfriend Maggie, turned up in 2021’s High Holiday, which is apparently a movie about a family Christmas dinner in which someone slips weed into the salad dressing so that everyone (including her right wing politician father) will get blazed and say their true feelings out loud?  Sounds ghastly…I guess maybe someday I’ll watch it and find out.

That Takes Me Back: I have to say, there’s a number of slices of classic mid-2000s life here.  Iris’s job is writing wedding columns for a British newspaper, and while we get only glimpses of her older word-processing software in use, the fact that she’s working in old school journalism at all feels quaint these days.  At one point Amanda’s awful ex shouts at her, “You sleep with your BlackBerry.”  Can’t get more 2006 than that.  Iris is carrying a BlackBerry around, too, sending emails on it from the plane (prior to takeoff, we assume).  When Amanda searches for vacation homes to escape to, she types in a simple keyword search and gets actual functional Google results with no ads or promoted posts cluttering things up: talk about things we didn’t appreciate until they were gone.  And one of the most charming and funny and ultimately sad scenes for Iris and Miles unfolds as they peruse a video store stocked with every kind of film on DVD — I miss those places all the time anyway, but especially when I’m trying to track down forgotten holiday films.

I Understood That Reference: I wish there was anything of this kind to dwell on here, but somehow in a film that’s at least partially obsessed with classic Hollywood films and movies with great music (thanks to the careers of Arthur and Miles respectively, and their effusive personalities), no holiday-themed media ever comes up in the film’s screenplay, even in passing.  It’s a real missed opportunity.

Holiday Vibes (5/10):  I don’t want to seem ungrateful: after all, Meyers opens the movie at an office holiday party, and the soundtrack is chock full of Christmas bops, including multiple people singing to us about a merry little Christmas and Motown singers walking in a winter wonderland.  But the film’s not all that interested in Christmas other than as set dressing — there’s no family Christmas gathering on either side of the pond, only a couple of painful gift exchanges, and as the movie progresses, the sound’s less Motown and more Imogen Heap (which is not a complaint: I love Imogen Heap).  None of these people seem to be living lives in which ordinary Christmas activities are really part of the routine — it would have made sense to have a “frantic shopping for Christmas gift” section, or a “my homesickness is assuaged by this particular Christmas memory or moment that feels familiar” but it’s not in the cards.

Actual Quality (8/10):  It’s a solid Nancy Meyers movie with a great cast — there’s more than enough great set design and good cinematography, and some lovely people to watch fall in love on screen.  Hard to be disappointed in that.  It still drags at times, as noted, in the Amanda/Graham sections, and I found myself wondering how awesome it would be to just have a film about Iris — an English fish out of water in Southern California for Christmas, simultaneously finding herself loving and being loved by two sweet fellows, an elderly Hollywood widower who’s surely being reminded of the love of his life and a teddy bear of a film composer with an impish grin who’s on the rebound himself.  That film, I think, had real 9 or 9.5 out of 10 potential, especially with Winslet, Wallach, and Black in the main roles.  As it is, it’s a solid B- of a film, for me.

Party Mood-Setter?  To me, no — it’s too sexual for Christmas with the kids but not sexy enough for a more flirtatious party of young adults.  It’s playful enough and cinematic enough at times to get closer to qualifying, especially with those lush Nancy Meyers interiors, but fundamentally it’s a movie that needs your whole attention, and that wants to deliver most of its message through scenes that are at least a little poignant.  Not great for inconsistent attention while you’re doing something else.

Plucked Heart Strings?  This one is much closer, for me, but it’s still a no — the movie invests most of its big emotional arc in Cameron Diaz as Amanda, which again I think is not really working on either a screenplay or an acting level.  If you do get misty-eyed at this film, I think it’ll be out of sympathy for Kate Winslet’s Iris, whom she makes a human being with genuine pain in her life that she needs to triumph over.  I can see it — it just didn’t happen for me.

Recommended Frequency:  This is definitely a “now and then, in the right mood” film, from my perspective.  There’s not enough here to make it a perennial classic, especially because, ironically, the actual holiday content in a film called The Holiday is a bit thin.  But it’s also more than watchable enough, especially (as I’ve made pretty plain) the to-me-superior subplots involving Iris, for me to imagine putting it on again in the future, now and then, when I’m in the mood to see particular moments or a particular acting performance again.

You can find The Holiday streaming on Amazon Prime, or for rent at the usual places (AppleTV, Google Play, Fandango at Home, etc.). You could pick up the Blu-ray (or DVD) at Amazon pretty inexpensively, it looks like. And of course I will always recommend you check at your local library: according to Worldcat, there are thousands of copies waiting out there for you! As will always be true here, I earn nothing from any links I’m providing: they’re just here as a courtesy. If you give the movie a go, I hope you’ll leave your thoughts in the comments!