Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Emma Chance | Film | December 23, 2024
Every yuletide my timeline is besieged with memes and reels and content galore about Nancy Meyers’ 2006 romcom, The Holiday, and its leading male heartthrob, Jude Law, and every year I hold back my feelings. But not this year, dear reader. Not this year.
Don’t get me wrong, Jude Law is a capital H Hunk. You know by now that I love a Brit, especially a bookish one. The phrase “countryside widower,” which describes his character Graham, fills my heart and my loins with warmth. But Jude Law is not the hottest hottie of The Holiday. Jack Black is.
Black plays Miles, the quirky, charismatic film composer who slowly but surely falls for Kate Winslet’s Iris. The thing about Miles and Iris, or Jack and Kate, is that their essence and love story are realistic and believable. Cameron Diaz and Jude Law are like robot versions of beautiful people, and, let’s be honest, how many countryside, bookish, single-dad widowers are going to lay their eyes on some blonde blow-in at the pub one day and drop to his knees in adoration? It’s all too quaint, too adorable.
I’m not the first person to have this thought, of course. “Miles and Iris barely kiss,” writes Anya Jaremko-Greenwold for The Cut. “It’s about the build-up, the innuendo of what we don’t see happen onscreen.”
Exactly. In real life, it’s the anticipation of sex that’s sexy—the stolen glances and friendly touches, the wondering and the yearning.
Then there’s the romance. Miles writes a piece of music for Iris that he says “sounds like” her. They go on a date to Blockbuster (RIP); he invites three old men over for Hannukah dinner, where they regale Iris with their stories of Old Hollywood; he fishes a piece of dirt from her eyeball because someone has to. Come on!
Do I fantasize about moving to the cozy cottage in the Cotswolds and falling in love with a hot widower with a penchant for turtlenecks? Absolutely! But a fantasy is just that, dear reader: a fantasy. I know it’s never gonna actually happen. I don’t even really want it to happen. You know what they say about meeting your heroes.
A guy like Miles, though? He’s real. He’s real, and he just might love me.
