The Station

---

I thought it best to kick off by tearing apart a light-hearted Christmas staple. ‘Tis the season to be overly critical of everyone’s seasonal favourites, fa-la-la-la-la!

I conducted a little survey recently and asked my friends which Christmassy films held a special place in their heart. Home Alone, Love Actually and Miracle on 34th Street were all mentioned several times. Even Nativity!, Martin Freeman’s cute 2011 addition to UK Christmas culture came up. However, across the board, without fail, every single one of my friends said The Holiday.

Not one of them said Die Hard, though. Let’s not even go there.

The Holiday, in case you haven’t experienced the joy, is a 2006 Christmas film, split setting-wise between Surrey and Southern California. Kate Winslet plays lovelorn Iris, obsessed with her newly-engaged colleague and ex, Jasper. Cameron Diaz plays high-flying, emotionally avoidant Amanda, who has just broken up with her long-term cheating boyfriend. Long story short, they swap houses for two weeks over Christmas and romantic chaos ensues. Sounds simple and sweet enough, doesn’t it?

Well, in order to get into the Christmas spirit, I suggested that me and my boyfriend watch The Holiday together a few days ago. He’d never seen it and I remember enjoying it many, many moons ago. A great idea, surely!

Alas. I simply cannot tell you how much of a difficult rewatch this was. At the end of it, I practically had to have my eyebrows surgically unraised. My boyfriend, not really a rom-com fan at the best of times, was not won over, despite his definite soft spot for the lovely Kate Winslet. I’m not going to pretend I know an awful lot about the art of film-making; I’m an English Lit graduate and therefore my interest is in the plot and characterisation. I won’t be saying ‘bad script, terrible lighting’, but rather, I want to analyse this as a fictional construct. So, with that said, I’m going to share the most eyebrow-raising moments with you below; feel free to tell me to have a day off and drink a Bailey’s.

1. Amanda’s inability to cry

Almost straight away, we learn that Amanda doesn’t cry. She yells at her cheating boyfriend, ‘why does it bother you so much that I can’t cry?!’ Then she rubs her upper chest and grimaces, as if she’s suffering from heartburn. This whole bit continues throughout the film – whenever Amanda experiences any emotional distress, she starts rubbing her chest and pulling a face. Of course, her romantic interest Graham (Jude Law) is a self-described cry-baby who eventually she is able to shed a little tear over as she leaves him for California. I do understand what this is all driving at; he allows her to be vulnerable enough to open up and talk about her parents’ divorce, they have seemingly electric sex, he has two gorgeous little girls who she bonds with, and then she has to leave. But there’s just something about this block within her, this inability to cry since the moment her parents divorced, being suddenly solved by sleeping with some random (admittedly handsome) English bloke that irritates me. It just reads as Jude Law the manic pixie dream girl… but wait! Everything is flipped! He’s a man! She’s got a high-powered career! This isn’t the manic pixie dream girl trope all over again because he has a penis! Wrong. Frankly, it’s just as annoying and reductive when the male romantic lead is used as a shallow plot device to help the woman self-actualise, especially when his two children are also given no opportunity to exist in 3D, despite the fact that they’ve lost their mother – Cameron Diaz turning up looking like a barbie doll on Christmas Eve simply would not go down well with two still-grieving little girls. Even more annoying is the suggestion that all this extremely successful, good-looking, strong, self-motivated woman needs is the right man to make her cry over a two-week holiday fling to solve her trauma-induced avoidant attachment style. God knows that what a woman who dares to live like a man really needs is a man to show her how to truly live like a woman!

2. Iris and Miles are completely incompatible

Hear me out here. I am acutely aware that Kate Winslet and Jack Black have got absolutely no sexual chemistry whatsoever, which doesn’t help matters. But my problem with these characters is not the actors’ diabolical lack of any sort of spark. It is with their fundamental incompatibility. Quite honestly, they seem to bond towards the end of the film over mutual relationship trauma, but nothing else. They don’t seem to have any shared interests, they talk almost exclusively about Amanda’s elderly neighbour (who Iris seems to relate to much more easily) for most of the film and her earnest, introspective energy simply does not match his performative, slightly goofy, mildly quirky vibe. I think, rather than lovers, they would make excellent next-door neighbours. They could bitch gently over the garden fence about Margaret who lives across the road and wave to each other in the supermarket. Much more believable.

3. Foreplay? Significantly overrated.

This is just the strangest thing. Amanda, whilst seducing Graham (after he turns up unannounced at the cottage and then doesn’t immediately leave), states in reaction to his weird question about foreplay that it is ‘significantly overrated’. In response, he tells her she’s quickly becoming the most interesting girl he’s ever met, then reassures her that she’s ‘better than she thinks’ at sex.

How do I even begin to unpick this one?

For starters, Graham, approximately 18% of women are able to regularly orgasm from penetrative sex alone. You are not telling me that this grown man who has literally been married has only explored sexually within that 18%. He is surely completely aware that foreplay is an excellent way to help a woman to achieve orgasm and to even be prepared for sex physiologically. What are you trying to say, Graham? That you simply can’t be bothered to help a woman you’re sexually involved with to become aroused enough to allow you to have sex with her comfortably? What a turn-on.

Seriously, why does this make her more ‘interesting’ to him when he’s supposedly such a sensitive and vulnerable character? Is it because she doesn’t seem to value her own pleasure? Is it because he thinks she will potentially allow him to be a thoughtless, selfish lover? Surely it would be more in character for him to want to change her mind about this particular opinion that she has?

Of course, we all like different things in the bedroom – I’m certainly not here to kink-shame – but surely for the average woman, going from no stimulation whatsoever straight into sex isn’t going to feel great for her? I don’t know. Maybe I’m just too vanilla to understand Amanda and Graham’s wild, instant, ‘lubrication is for the weak’ sexual connection. How chaotic.

4. Why are they all together at New Year?

I’m not going to dwell on this for too long but here are the implications of this:

• Amanda has relented and stayed in England with Graham despite the fact that she has a huge house, her own business and actual employees and responsibilities in LA.
• She is also presumably, as a woman he met just two weeks before, staying with him and his two young children. Let’s hope to god she’s not actually a serial killer because frankly, who would know? She’s a literal stranger.
• Miles is there too, of course, because he kissed Iris that one time at an event. Excellent reasoning. This chaotic get-together of people who barely know each other plus two kids in some house in Surrey is essentially their second date.
• Speaking of kids, those two girls are for some reason having the time of their lives in the midst of this stranger danger. Having met real-life children before, I don’t buy it.

I could go on. This film essentially runs on wine, standing around in kitchens and Jude Law’s eyelashes. I can’t even bring myself to mention Jasper because wow, what an entire mess. But rest assured, my rewatch of The Holiday lifted the veil of delusion and made me extremely aware that what I once saw as romantic and aspirational, I now simply find to be a logistical nightmare. Maybe I should stick Die Hard on after all.