The Holiday: We Accept the Love We Think We Deserve

Two women suffering from unfaithful boyfriends swap homes in California and Britain, respectively, where they each meet a local guy and fall in love. By unfaithful, I don’t necessarily mean cheating; rather, the cheating variety can be situated within the larger category of not committing to love one person completely and with fullness of heart. Such is the plot of The Holiday (2006), a film that is essentially about five good people. As the three unfaithful people are pruned out, the viewer is left with an optimistic feeling about human beings being capable of emotional intimacy.

The film opens with Amanda Woods finally getting confirmation that Ethan has been sleeping with a coworker. In fact, the deceitful guy is in love with the other woman. Frozen emotionally from the pain of witnessing her parents split up many years earlier, Amanda cannot bring herself even to cry. In an idyllic hope to get over the hurt by spending Christmas in Europe, she swaps houses with Iris Simpkins. Iris is in love with Jasper Bloom, whose engagement to a coworker takes Iris by surprise. Faced with the excruciating hurt from being in love with someone who has chosen someone else, Iris too goes with the idyllic hope that a few weeks in Los Angeles will lessen or remove the pain.

In England, Amanda meets Iris’s brother, Graham, who does not take long to fall for her. His love is real. Indeed, a deep connection can be sensed up front without meaning it is merely a crush. I think such connections can exist from the start, rather than necessarily coming about only after two people grow together. Amanda is paralyzed deep down, but she finally melts at the last minute and the two are together on New Year’s Eve.

In Southern California, Iris befriends Miles, and their mutually growing interest reflects perhaps a more subtle connection that can “fly under the radar” without detection. Arthur Abbott, a retired screenwriter and neighbor whom Iris befriends, sees the connection before either Iris or Miles, and Arthur’s good nature shows through as he acts as a catalyst. Even so, Iris is distracted by Jasper, who keeps in contact with her for selfish, inconsiderate reasons, and Miles still has feelings for his ex-girlfriend, whom he discovers has been cheating on him. She finally shuts the door (literally) on Jasper when he was visiting her in Los Angeles, and Miles refuses to give Sophie a second chance. Once trust has been sliced apart by not enough love on one end, even the other person being very much in love is not sufficient to heal the ruptured intimacy. Love must be mutual, or it is bound to go off kilter and crash.

In The Holiday, the people who are strong enough in character to say yes to emotional intimacy with one person above all others win the day. The film presents a world in which good people rise above the chaff. Life is not one big picnic with noodle salad for those people; Iris, Amanda, and Miles must struggle, for instance, to overcome their respective feelings for people of a lesser god—wounded souls who for whatever reasons cannot or will not overcome their inner demons and come the rest of the way to adult intimacy. As the last scene shows, much carefree freedom goes with the mutual intimacy, whereas the freedom of the deceivers is illusory, for they are trapped in souls too afraid to grow.

Casablanca: What Makes a Film into a Classic?

Like books and songs, many movies have been made that cannot escape their particular time. In writing my academic book, for example, I aspired to speak beyond those living to generations not yet born because my aim was the production of knowledge beyond mere artifacts of the world in which I live. I knew that the verdict on whether the text passes that crucial test could only come long after my own death. Among films, even though Casablanca is a film immersed in, and thus reflecting its time—the context in 1942 being of course World War II—the film transcends all that to resonate in the following century. In his oral commentary, Rudy Behlmer argues that the film “transcends time.” He goes on to provide us with a list of the usual suspects behind what lies behind the making of a classic.

Firstly, the interplay of the characters still resonates, in that it means something to people outside of that context and is thus still able to illicit emotional responses. In this sense, the film still lives. For example, being torn between two lovers is hardly a dated concept, as the experience renews itself in each generation. Rick’s dejected mood following being betrayed while in love is also something that resonates with many people, and undoubtedly in generations to come. Unfortunately, even a corrupt public official, personified as Louis in the film, is all too familiar to us today, whereas Laslo’s willingness to sacrifice for a higher purpose is largely lost in all the tussle of the business-oriented, consumerist cultures today. Yet the salience of the ideals—sacrifice and renunciation in fighting the good fight against the bad guys—still resonate because ideals themselves are timeless.

Secondly, although Laslo and Louis may be too cliché, Bogart’s character (Rick) is both complex and dynamic (i.e., follows a character arc). As Behlmer puts it, “he is not a bad guy . . . He was an idealist, lost it, and then regained it.” Additionally, Elsa is not some stereotypical love object, and she undergoes changes as well. She becomes caught in the emotional struggle of loving two men in different ways or for different reasons. Rick too is conflicted, most notably whether to send Elsa on with her husband. In fact, as Roger Ebert points out in his oral commentary, the German-expressionistic lighting being associated with the two characters on screen sends a message of emotional turmoil to the viewer’s subconscious. Both this multi-layered approach and internal emotional conflict itself help the film resonate with viewers in any era.

Lastly, the build-up of suspense, owing in part to the difficulty a first-time viewer has in predicting the ending, points to the plot itself as contributing to the film having become a classic. Weaving together strands from melodrama (i.e., plot-driven), drama (i.e., character-driven), comedy, and suspense-thriller helps the film itself avoid stereotyping and provides it with a certain multivalency—a term that Margaret Mead applies to symbol. Perhaps having a multidimensionality renders a film more interesting, and in this respect too makes it more likely that a film will survive into succeeding eras.

In Socrates’s dialogues, both narrative and dialogue of course are salient. In reading them, I noticed that very little that only an ancient Greek would be familiar with is in the texts. The orientation being philosophical, timeless ideas are major players, and, in The Apology at least, the narrative of an innocent man being put on trial and sentenced to death still resonates. In fact, early Christian theologians such as Jerome and Tertullian wrote of Socrates as anticipating Christianity as a “Christ figure.” In fact, the notion of the immortality of the soul comes from Socrates’s Meno (pre-bodily existence being necessary for us to be able to recall knowledge not taught). In short, avoiding things that people in other epochs could not know and privileging ideals and principles that transcend a particular time and place may be vital ingredients to making a film into a classic.

Tired Characterization and Narrative: The Dowager Countess in “Quartet”

I’m on a quest. Not of the Biblical variety, as I do not intend to take on The Screenwriter’s Bible. Nor does my aspiration fall under the treasure-hunt genre, for I am no Harrison Ford or Johnny Depp. My lofty goal is to fashion a narrative that is at once readily comprehensible and novel rather than formulaic. Whether from having lived past forty or some objective fact in an industry whose story-telling groves have become as deep as those in a well-trodden Roman road, I am instinctively drawn to break out of a rather dogmatically constraining aperture of story-telling. Simply put, the world may soon become bored with familiar storylines. The key to freedom from ennui may well be the achievement of a deep awareness of the extant contours of the modern story so often percolating out of Hollywood. In this essay, I examine Quartet, a 2012 film about four retired opera singers living in a stately yet nearly bankrupt home for retired musicians.

Maggie Smith plays Jean Horton, a singer whose fame eclipses that of the other singers in the house. This permits the character to take on the scent of a more notable character, the Dowager Countess, which Smith was playing in the popular television series, Downton Abbey (which in its fourth season began to suffer as well from recycled plot-themes). At one point in Quartet, Smith’s character says in exasperation to an on-coming house-maid in a hallway, “One way or the other, dear.” The likeness in diction and tone to the great lines that Smith delivers in Downton Abbey would not be lost on any viewers of the series. While leveraging on an actor’s more popular character may titillate an audience and thus earn some points at the box office, the very same viewers may also get the impression of tired dialogue and characterization. I take it as an article of faith that strong narrative requires its own characters, rather than those clothed with the well-worn garments of characters from other stories.

Similarly, the dramatic conflict in a story risks not being taken serious if it comes across as too formulaic. In Quartet, Tom Courtenay plays Reginald Paget, a member of the quartet who had been briefly married to the cheating Horton. His turn-about from a desire to leave the home when Horton moved occurs at break-neck speed and is woefully predictable. As formulaic as this “relationship” tension is, the denoument of the related “task” obstacle is even more predictable. The attentive viewer cannot help but realize early on that the film would largely reduce to whether Horton agrees to join the other three singers in the quartet. Incredibly, with so much riding on Horton’s resistance, the audience gets precious little payback as the film ends as the quartet’s members are being introduced on stage. 

From this case study, I wonder—je me demande—whether the element of dramatic tension in films hasn’t become too monolithic. Moreover, can the element be overdone in a narrative? In early films such as Frankenstein (1931), the dramatic tension is overcome relatively quickly once the conflict takes over the story. Today, the fighting can go on and on, as if it were an end in itself. I suspect that the “big question” in Quartet is distended in its significance in order to carry along a story that banks on Maggie Smith’s aristocratic character in Downton Abbey.  Whether in extending that narrative beyond its natural lifespan or in exporting the Dowager Countess into other narratives that themselves follow all too worn groves, the art of film and story-telling more broadly suffer. Perhaps the overriding question here is whether the conformity is artificial or in some way an actual constraint.