A romantic comedy is only as strong as its leads, and “The Holiday” is chocked full of likeable ones. Jack Black, Jude Law, Cameron Diaz and Kate Winslet all owe their success to portraying the types of people the audience would like to befriend, so it's no surprise that this film has plenty of charm that more than compensates for its lack of depth and plausibility.

　　 The yarn begins with two women attempting to escape the types of bad relationships that only Hollywood could dream up. Successful Amanda (Cameron Diaz), a movie trailer producer, is throwing out her long-time boyfriend for cheating with his secretary. (One wonders if the secretaries of the world resent the movie industry for portraying them as married men’s folly). Simultaneously, in England, Iris (Kate Winslet) discovers that her boyfriend (Rufus Sewell doing his best impersonation of some sort of lizard) is engaged to another woman.

　　 The two women meet up on the Internet, and decide to exchange homes for Christmas in an attempt to get away from it all. Iris moves into Amanda’s LA mansion, complete with a swimming pool, massive DVD collection (that includes the only purchased copy of “Gigli”--look hard for it people, it’s there), and the romantic Santa Ana winds that blow whenever Iris feels romantic.英文影评 In exchange, Amanda gets to live in Iris’s life-affirming English cottage that apparently was designed by Thomas Kinkade.

　　 Both women take up simple hobbies. Amanda decides to pass the time in England by slipping in the snow and bumping her head on the cottage’s low ceilings. Iris befriends an old Jewish screenwriter (Eli Wallach) and makes his life better in exchange for stories about how he added the ‘kid’ part to ‘Here’s Looking at you, kid’ in “Casablanca.” Wallach takes this nothing role and makes the audience pine for his screen time.

　　 Since this is a holiday romance, both women are destined for happiness. Iris meets Miles (Jack Black) a loveable composer, and although he’s dating someone else, his girlfriend cheats on him, so she exits the film pretty quickly. (Look for Black’s doe-eyed sequence when he discovers her indiscretion.)

　　 Meanwhile Amanda meets Iris’s brother Graham (Jude Law), who on the surface appears to be the same guy Law played in “Alfie,” but when she peels back his layers it turns out he’s the most perfect uber-male on the planet.

　　 Because everyone is rich and in love, you can see the happy ending coming a mile away, but with a film like this, it’s the journey that’s important and not the destination. Writer and director Nancy Meyers keeps things from getting too syrupy, and brings out the natural charm of everyone involved. At 2 hours and 18 minutes, the running time is a bit long, but watching a film like this is like eating hot oatmeal: a pleasant and benign experience.