“Last Holiday” is a comfort food kind of movie. Unlike the exotic, continential dishes that figure heavily into “Last Holiday,” you won’t find many spicy bits or anything particularly surprising. But you will find a simple, solid film that, like its heroine, doesn’t puts on airs or dumb itself down.

Queen Latifah takes center stage in “Holiday” as Georgia Byrd, a humble salesperson at Kragen’s, a department store in a pre-Katrina New Orleans. Georgia is quiet and unobtrusive. She cooks scrumptious gourmet meals for her neighbor, but limits herself to dinner à la Lean Cuisine; at work, she keeps her head down and sells cookware as best she can, all while pining for fellow employee Sean Matthews (LL Cool J). Just as she works up the nerve to ask Sean out, Georgia bumps her head on a cabinet. A resulting CAT scan reveals she has a rare, fatal disease, and the doctors tell her she only has three weeks left to live.

Rather than wallowing in self-pity (which, admittedly, she briefly does), Georgia decides to fulfill all the desires and wishes she’d put aside during her life. She books a first-class vacation to the Grandhotel Pupp in Europe, a sumptuous resort that is coincidentally playing host to Matthew Kragen (Timothy Hutton), the rich and ruthless owner of Georgia’s workplace. Kragen is there with his mistress (Alicia Witt) and a couple of Louisiana politicos, whom he hopes to wine and dine into passing some business legislation for him. But it’s Georgia who attracts everyone’s attention, with a sweet, outsized personality and an appetite for all the hotel has to offer, including the menu of Chef Didier (Gerard Depardieu), Georgia’s culinary idol.

It’s Georgia’s request for everything on Didier’s menu that first draws the attention of Pupp’s posh crowd. But it’s Georgia’s personality (and Latifah’s understated performance) that captivates both the hotel’s guest and the film’s viewers. Georgia never becomes a crass, over-the-top character—a problem that occurs in so many of Latifah’s other films (check out “Bringing Down the House,” if you dare). Instead, Latifah plays it straight and sweet, keeping her character true to her roots, even when she’s winning thousands of dollars at a European casino. Latifah is a capable, confident actress who, for every good role she snags (“Chicago,” for instance), gets stuck in a painful abomination of a movie (like “Taxi”).

“Last Holiday” plays it by the numbers, so you can probably deduce on your own how this all ends. It’s a quiet, predictable little film that manages to leave you feeling pretty OK without being too cloying or annoying. It’s not memorable, like a meal of braised lamb or a fancy soufflé, but, like a steaming bowl of stew, it can satisfy a craving you didn’t know you had. 

directed by: Wayne Wang
starring: Queen Latifah, LL Cool J, Timothy Hutton and Alicia Witt
rated: PG-13 for a smattering of sexual references