Happy Sunday, friends!
Pretending to be at a bar during quarantine like
Unsolicited non-movie recommendation: I’ve spent the last week bingeing the latest season of Karina Longworth’s podcast You Must Remember This, which tells the life story of Polly Platt. Her history is a largely forgotten one in Hollywood, though it’s an incredibly consequential one that cuts from New Hollywood to The Simpsons and through ‘90s indie cinema. It’s a necessary and important corrective to the movie mythology that valorizes the men of this era while minimizing the vital contributions of women. It’s 10 hours well spent, even if you aren’t a huge movie buff!
I missed this update last week, and it feels like an important one to share. Per CNN, Dr. Fauci has warned of the long-term health effects that COVID-19 might have on young people contracting the virus. In subsequent check-ups, recovered patients “have a substantially high proportion of cardiovascular abnormalities, evidence of myocarditis by MRI and PET scans, evidence of emerging cardiomyopathies.” Something to keep in mind if you’re tempting fate and letting your guard down before there’s a vaccine or spread has been controlled…
Lastly, a co-worker drew my attention to the amazing work being done by a group called Heart of Dinner. They’ve been profiled in Vice and The New York Times if you’re curious to learn more, but the organization at its core is about delivering home-cooked meals and handwritten notes to New York’s elderly Asian-American residents, a community that has come under threat of racism and xenophobia during the pandemic. (Calling COVID-19 “the China Virus,” as a White House official did as recently as yesterday, is not helping.) They hit 20,000 meal deliveries earlier this month and are now raising their goal to hit 50,000!
Now, what you came for…
DAY 164: The Holiday (available on Amazon Prime)
“Every great film should seem new every time you see it,” Roger Ebert memorably opined. Admittedly, I’ve fallen back on a lot of comfort food during the pandemic (largely to keep having fresh things to say to you for over five months) and have to find ways to make films feel fresh rather than just reheated on cable. One way I’ve done this is by diving into director’s commentary tracks and getting insight into how things get made. And contrary to what you might expect, often times the commentaries are best on movies where the filmmaking seems more invisible. There’s usually a ton of thought and craft hiding in plain sight.
All this is a long wind-up to say that I revisited The Holiday for the umpteenth time last week, only this time I did so with writer/director — and now fantastic Instagram follow — Nancy Meyers commenting over the film. (Sorry, this is not available with streaming.) I came away with a much greater appreciation for why her movies seem to strike a more resonant chord than the standard issue rom-com. Simply put, Meyers knows the genre’s history and pulls inspiration from classics without ripping them off entirely. She’s a true classicist, and it results in some truly wholesome pleasures.
Take, for instance, the film’s two leading ladies and their proclivity for jumping. It’s physicality as exclamation point, though the moments feel normal within the context of The Holiday. But as Meyers pointed out, it’s actually fairly radical given the constricted range of “acceptable” emotions to express within a straight-laced film. She took the inspiration from Carole Lombard, one of my favorite leading ladies of the screwball era, in the 1937 film Nothing Sacred. (I haven’t seen it, but rest assured it shot up in my queue thanks to Meyers’ mention.)
She discussed her thought process, too, behind how suave men react to high-strung women on-screen through an old Hollywood paradigm. When Katharine Hepburn was paired opposite Spencer Tracy, he would typically try to tame her antics into submission. But when she co-starred with the more tender Cary Grant, he would typically just enjoy her presence and let her be. When the debonair Jude Law appears in The Holiday, watch the way he responds to Cameron Diaz. The shadings are subtle, but they make a big difference as their romance begins to blossom.
She also spoke to watching The Apartment (a recent recommendation) three times prior to making The Holiday, which makes total sense and led to some real reexamination of the film for me. Though Meyers’ films often take hold in the cultural imagination for their exteriors (I mean … those KITCHENS), there’s more beneath the glossy surfaces. Cameron Diaz’s Amanda and Kate Winslet’s Iris, in a proto-Airbnb situation, trade houses in December to get away from their heartbreak at home during the holiday season. They find some romance and personal gumption in their escape, sure, but Meyers doesn’t shy away from the wrenching emotion and self-doubt that led to such a drastic life decision in the first place.
Her films are full of women confronting the dilemmas of reaching a certain station in their life, some of which come from society and others of which come from themselves. Meyers will always opt for the tidy resolution of thorny issues because, well, she’s an old-fashioned moviemaker. But pay close attention to the small details of how The Holiday comes to a close, even — or especially if — you’ve caught it a million times on cable. Happy endings do not always equal a happily ever after. Perhaps in our swooning over the emotionality of the ending, we see the genre trope and miss the fine print of how Meyers executes it. There’s more than meets the eye here and throughout the film.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall