• Genres: Comedy, Romance
• Plot Outline Two women troubled with guy-problems (Diaz, Winslet) swap homes in each other’s countries, where they each meet a local guy and fall in love.
• Plot Synopsis: Movie trailer editor, Amanda of Los Angeles, CA and journalist Iris of Surrey, England live five thousand miles apart and have never met, but are dealing with the same problem: men. Amanda having just broken up with her cheating boyfriend, Ethan and Iris having pined for her ex, Jasper, becoming engaged to the woman he left her for decide to take a vacation during Christmas. They come upon a website called home exchange and swap houses for two weeks both with a goal to forget their troubled love lives. But love ends up finding them anyways. Amanda starts a romance with Iris’ older brother, Graham, a book editor and Iris starts a romance with a movie composer named Miles. With new found romance, both their lives change forever.
• Plot Keywords: Los Angeles California | Widow | Screwball | Video Store | Christmas | Screenwriter | Film Composer | Crying | Bathtub Scene | London England
• Actors: Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jack Black, Eli Wallach, See more
• Directors: Nancy Meyers

Editorial Review

As a pleasant dose of holiday cheer, The Holiday is a lovable love story with all the Christmas trimmings. In the capable hands of writer-director Nancy Meyers (making her first romantic comedy since Something’s Gotta Give), it all begins when two successful yet unhappy women connect through a home-swapping website, and decide to trade houses for the Christmas holiday in a mutual effort to forget their man troubles. Iris (Kate Winslet) is a London-based journalist who lives in a picture-postcard cottage in Surrey, and Amanda (Cameron Diaz) owns a movie-trailer production company (leading her to cutely imagine most of her life as a “coming attraction”) and lives in a posh mansion in Beverly Hills. Iris is heartbroken from unrequited love with a cad of a colleague (Rufus Sewell), and Amanda has just broken up with her cheating boyfriend (Edward Burns), so their home-swapping offers mutual downtime to reassess their love lives. This being a Nancy Meyers movie (where everything is fabulously decorated and romantic wish-fulfillment is virtually guaranteed), Amanda hooks up with Iris’s charming brother Graham (Jude Law), and Iris is unexpectedly smitten with Miles (Jack Black), a super-nice film composer on the downside of a failing relationship. –Jeff Shannon