I might be the only person who argues that Nancy Meyers’s romantic comedy The Holiday (2006) is about death. Death in The Holiday isn’t ‘movie death,’ however, with its grand importance and scene-anchoring gravitas. It’s death the way that people talk about death in the real world, which is to say: softly and with as little frequency as possible. Or flippantly, as if a joke can erase death’s terrifying permanence. Graham (Jude Law) reluctantly telling Amanda (Cameron Diaz) that his wife passed away by spelling out “W-I-D-O-W-E-R” with zero follow-up is an example of the former. Iris (Kate Winslet) attempting suicide in the first 20 minutes by huffing gas from her stovetop range, played for laughs—the latter. Both approaches are designed to remove death from daily conversation. But avoidance techniques are a young person’s game. It’s harder to ignore death when someone is 90 years old, like Eli Wallach’s Arthur.
The core of The Holiday is Iris’s relationship with Arthur and his refusal to attend a lifetime achievement award ceremony hosted by the Writers Guild of America. On the surface, the conflict is superficial; he’s worried about being able to walk down to the stage to accept the award unassisted, and he’s afraid only a handful of people will attend. But celebrating someone’s lifetime of achievements is also acknowledging that life is finite. Participating in such a ceremony means confronting your own mortality.
It may seem odd to suggest that Arthur is a stand-in for Meyers herself in The Holiday, but the signs are there. Meyers has a well-documented history of inserting herself into her work. In a 2020 essay for the New York Times, she admitted that It’s Complicated was based on her repartee with ex-husband Charles Shyer. “I don’t think Charles liked that I wrote something kind of like us,” Meyers wrote. “He told me at the time the movie came out that he wasn’t going to see it. Ten years later, he has still never mentioned that one to me. And then there’s the ex-husband in Something’s Gotta Give. I really do enjoy writing the ex-husband character, a relationship rich with humor and filled with pain.” Recently, she revealed on her Instagram that the pivotal Mr. Napkin Head act in The Holiday was something Shyer used to do for their kids.
Meyers writes her leads as stand-ins, often going through life changes similar to Meyers’s own, like getting married, becoming a parent, and confronting a failed relationship. Across all her work (including that with Shyer), these women are often capable and complex: highly-skilled with grit and determination, but still emotionally vulnerable when forced to confront a world hostile to women. There’s Goldie Hawn’s Judy Benjamin in Private Benjamin (1980), an adrift widow accidentally recruited to the Army; Baby Boom’s (1987) J.C. Wiatt (Diane Keaton), a successful business executive who struggles to have it all when she inherits a baby; and Jane Adler (Meryl Streep), whose struggles with divorce in It’s Complicated (2009) rope her back into a situationship with her ex-husband.
In The Holiday, neither Iris nor Amanda has the complexity of a classic Meyers lead. Both are extremely capable: Amanda owns a company that produces movie trailers, and Iris is a skilled columnist and writer. But Amanda’s problems are having a bad boyfriend and being just slightly emotionally stiff, unable to cry since her parents’ divorce. Iris, on the other hand, is a weeper and a people-pleaser, stuck on a man who treats her poorly. Both solve these conundrums by meeting a nice man who has zero flaws. In Something’s Gotta Give (2003), Harry (Jack Nicholson) and Erica (Diane Keaton) both have to confront a full emotional story arc to understand they’re meant to be together. “I wrote about women in my films who blossomed post-divorce, much as I had done in some ways,” Meyers said. Neither Iris nor Amanda fits the bill.
Instead, Arthur acts as the avatar of Meyers; his arc throughout the movie confronts her issues with a shifting Hollywood landscape. When we first see Arthur, a 90-year-old Hollywood screenwriting legend, he’s struggling on a neighborhood walk. As he crosses Iris’s view, his feet stutter on the sidewalk, his face screwed into a sneer of confusion and struggle. It’s a face I’ve seen before, in my ex-wife’s grandfather, who died the same year this movie was released. When we watched the movie for the first time together a few years later, slipping the Netflix DVD out of its red sleeve, we were hoping for a light Friday night comedy to unwind from the week. Arthur’s appearance was a gut punch. Someone that old, that frail, is never long for the world, and the trauma of losing an older loved one is forever kettled inside at a low simmer. A struggle against illness is a fight that can be won; a struggle against old age is an attempt to defy time itself. For Meyers, Arthur represents a world she loves that she’s worried is dying. Preemptive grief is a powerful feeling.
I lost my last two remaining grandparents around six years ago. Both were in their 90s, both died from complications of old age, and both were active until their final, sharp decline. My grandfather on my dad’s side lived independently in an assisted care facility at the age of 98 and was witty, even when he started hospice. My grandmother on my mom’s side made it to 97 by walking laps around the dining table at the house she lived in with my aunt. She walked unassisted up until the moment of her death when her body gave out mid-stride. The last few years I spent with them felt weighted—every minute we had together while they were still alive was clouded by the knowledge that soon they wouldn’t be. Each transition point that they passed—turning in their driver’s licenses, moving into an assisted facility, no longer being able to bake their signature cinnamon rolls—was a mile marker towards the inevitable. Towards the very end of their life, both began to struggle with their independent mobility. My grandfather would forget or flat-out refuse to use his walker, and it was an eventual fall that led him to hospice. Arthur’s concern with mobility is first presented as vanity. “Would you like to walk out on a stage, on a walker, looking 100 years old, and see 11 schnooks who showed up just to see you?” he asks Iris with arms outstretched as if he’s pleading. Walking unassisted for someone Arthur’s age is more than vanity; it’s life-threatening.
Aruthur’s training montage returns to treating death lightheartedly. While Iris and Arthur turn a lap while walking in the pool, the camera flips, and Arthur slips below the water’s surface. It takes Iris two seconds to notice, and as Arthur pops up, he declares, “Yeah, I’m fine!” With its jazzy plucked guitar melody, the chipper score asks the audience to take the scene for laughs. In reality, what we’re seeing is an old man in denial. While he says he just slipped, the camera tells a different story. Shot from the back, Arthur’s head lowers slowly beyond the lip of the pool, suggesting fatigue instead of poor footing. His relationship with Iris has reinvigorated his spirit somewhat—he’s never confused again after the first time she finds him lost, wandering the streets—but you have to wonder if what Iris is helping him work toward is a swan song instead of a triumphant return to strength.
Arthur is only on screen for 20 minutes, though, and the rest of the movie plays out the budding romances between Graham and Amanda and Iris and Miles (Jack Black). The romances in The Holiday, on their own, are charming but not revolutionary. On release, the movie was met with tepid reviews from both critics and audiences; its major accolade was winning the Teen Choice Award for Chick Flick. It’s a sticky label that was hard to shake in 2006, but calling a Nancy Meyers movie a “chick flick” is both gendered and reductive. Meyers’s movies are qualified as romantic comedies, but in the same way that The Philadelphia Story (1940) is a romantic comedy. Influenced by 1940s screwballs as much as she was by the ’70s New Hollywood, a Nancy Meyers joint defies modern expectations of plotting, pacing, dialogue, and scene-setting. Meyers movies, at heart, are the types of movies Arthur used to write. Maybe it was easier to place Meyers’s own frustrations with the film industry on a 90-year-old Hollywood legend than to espouse them herself. Right before Iris convinces Arthur to train for his WGA award ceremony, he complains about the clip at which movies are being released: ”Nine movies are opening today. I remember when nine movies would open in a month. Now, the picture has to make a killing the first weekend, or they’re dead. This is supposed to be conducive to great work?”
Something’s Gotta Give ended its box office run as the 11th highest-grossing film of 2003, earning $266 million worldwide from an $80 million budget. But Something’s Gotta Give only opened to $16 million—half of what Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle, released six months prior, opened to, even though it earned less overall. Though she couldn’t have known it at the time, The Holiday opened even lower, at $12 million. It eventually broke $200 million, but Meyers’s problems as a filmmaker were already starting. Regardless of her box office success, Meyers’s career has been in limbo since The Intern was released to mixed reviews in 2015. Her most recent project, Paris Paramount, was dropped by Netflix over budget issues in 2023. Over a year later, it still appears to be stalled. “Pinterest told me I’m trending. That’s very nice but I’d rather be making a movie,” she wrote on her Instagram.
Meyers’s Instagram is a particular peek into her world. Between shots of a beautiful Beverly Hills home her daughter is renovating and countless stills of her own movies, Meyers’s grid is full of tributes to old Hollywood actors and movies she loves. This is key to her despair over the state of film in 2006, as expressed through Arthur: she knows her movies are too old-fashioned for the modern romantic comedy landscape and that her work is at risk of being forgotten, overlooked, or miscategorized. When Iris asks Arthur at dinner if Hollywood was really that good back then, he responds, “It was better.”
In that same scene, Arthur diagnoses Iris’s problems using the power of film. When the camera pushes in on Iris ugly-crying over her ex, Arthur delivers his homily: “Iris, in the movies, we have leading ladies, and we have the best friend. You, I can tell, are a leading lady. But for some reason, you’re behaving like the best friend.” It’s a moment of deus ex machina—Arthur’s words are Meyers’s, and in that moment, she’s stepping directly into her own movie to give a different character she wrote a pep talk. In this scene, Meyers puts the rom-com tropes of the current day directly into her sights. Box-office openings were becoming the top indicator for studio success, and romantic comedies needed formulaic reliability to juice those early numbers—two big stars, some amount of conflict, a quirky best friend, and resolution.
The romances in The Holiday are far too reminiscent of real life. Amanda has an opportunity to pursue a genuine connection, but that decision involves cross-Atlantic travel and potentially becoming a stepmom. Iris lacks self-esteem and lets herself be a doormat for the one man in her old life who gave her any attention. Both situations involve adults confronting the subtle weight of real-world relationships and showcase small struggles instead of big, comical miscommunications. In trying to subvert the cookie-cutter romance, The Holiday didn’t meet the categorical formula of its day. The Holiday’s rom-com contemporaries—films like Failure To Launch or You, Me and Dupree, with their by-the-book plotting—ate The Holiday’s lunch at the domestic box office on their opening weekends, despite their far poorer reviews.
The true resolution of The Holiday isn’t its romances, anyway. It’s Arthur’s appearance at his WGA award ceremony. When he triumphantly ascends the stairs on his own, Meyers imagines a happy ending for her own life, one in which she’s still independent, one in which her work has worth. Before his speech trails off, Arthur remarks, “When I first arrived in Tinseltown, there were no cineplexes or multiplexes. No such thing as a Blockbuster or DVD. I was here before conglomerates owned the studios. Before pictures had special effects teams. And definitely before box office results were reported like baseball on the nightly news.”
It’s a prescient speech for 2006. Just one month after the film’s release, Netflix launched its streaming service. When Meyers wrote Arthur’s big speech, there wasn’t precedent for how films would be rolled out in the 2020s. Her concerns over box office numbers were correct—these days, movies hit the screens for a weekend to rake in what cash they can before being shuttled off to a streaming service. Even worse, facing potentially bad openings, studios preemptively shutter already finished films for the tax breaks. The best way for auteurs to secure the budget for their films is to make multi-picture deals with streamers, like David Fincher did with Netflix and Martin Scorsese did with Apple, but even that route isn’t always viable. Netflix dropping Meyers’s Paris Paramount for its budget is par for the course; it’s hard to imagine a streaming service building a cottage from scratch when the movie might not even have a theatrical release to recoup the budget.
Arthur’s story doesn’t have an ending—happy or sad. In the middle of his grand speech, the camera cuts away to Iris and Miles finally revealing their feelings towards each other, and Arthur’s speech fades out entirely. It’s a fitting send-off for his character; at his age, he’ll eventually fade out from life itself. Arthur’s life and his implied eventual death carry the weight of a Hollywood forgotten. The current-day Hollywood lurches onward, unrecognizable from the one that Arthur knew. Instead of being a love letter to films of old, The Holiday is almost an elegy for a world Meyers knows is about to die.
And truly, no one gets a holiday from death.