rated PG-13

Director Nancy Meyers likes to have her main characters go through crying jags. In the middle of her previous feature, “Something’s Gotta Give,” Meyers had Diane Keaton give an epic weep-fest at the center of what was an otherwise beautiful and grounded performance. A woman crying pathetically over the man she has lost is not a new comedic idea, but apparently it’s a timeless one. Though its appeal, I will have to say, remains a mystery to me, audiences seem to buy it.

That could perhaps be the reason why Meyers has two female leads crying for us in her current feature, “The Holiday.” In Hollywood, bigger is better.

That’s not to say the movie is wholly without charisma. But how much you respond to it will largely depend on how you feel about watching beautiful movie stars act like the most charming and uncomplicated people in the world. I’m fairly susceptible to that—it’s very much a part of what movie-going is all about. But “The Holiday” is also not a movie that can’t stand up to any scrutiny. The tribulations of that heart that each of the four main characters suffers are simply routine.

Iris (Kate Winslet) is a successful journalist for The Daily Telegraph of London. Amanda (Cameron Diaz) is a successful producer of movie trailers in L.A.. But each has a hole in her heart: No man to make her happy. Thus, the tears.

In the opening moments of “The Holiday,” Amanda throws out her philandering boyfriend Ethan (played by Ed Burns, whose career looks to be teetering on the edge of collapse). Across the ocean in Britain, Iris is still in love with an old boyfriend. At the office Christmas party, Iris finds out that the ex—a star columnist at the paper—is about to be married.

She learns this because the editor announces that he has assigned Iris to do the story about the impending nuptials.
With tears flowing (actually, Amanda can’t cry because her emotions are all bottled up, but she tries), both Iris and Amanda decide they need a break from their immediate surroundings. Amanda clicks on a Web site for people who are willing to exchange houses for a week or so, and finds that Iris’s lovely English cottage is available. It is the very opposite of Amanda’s sleek, industrial-designed L.A. digs, but no matter. A brief exchange of e-mails finds Amanda jetting off to London, and Iris is on her way to America.

It is perhaps indicative of the fast-paced times in which we live that any real-life obstacles—the details of life, if you will—get tossed without concern so that we may move on to the meat of the story. It might have been interesting if Meyers (who also wrote the script) had Amanda and Iris establish a relationship, a sense of trust, perhaps, as they went through the process of renting each other’s homes. These two intelligent and successful women could have explored what it is in their lives they were missing. But Meyers, despite having produced a film called “What Women Want” (with Mel Gibson and Helen Hunt), is not really interested in that story. This is a “what-women-want-in-a-mass-marketed-movie” story, and of course that “what” is a relationship.

After arriving at their new temporary homes, the story splits across the two continents. On the first night, Iris’s brother Graham (Jude Law) shows up drunk and needs a place to crash. He and Amanda are instantly smitten with one another and decide to have a romp in the hay.

Iris, in L.A., embarks on a different kind of relationship, one that is infinitely more interesting and satisfying. While out driving one day, Iris sees her very old neighbor, Arthur Abbott (played by 91-year-old Eli Wallach), who, she learns, happens to be an Academy Award-winning screenwriter from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Iris warms to him, and he to her. They make a charming couple, and the moments Winslet and Wallach have with each other, while slim, are lovely to watch.

In the meantime, Iris is also lending a friendly ear to Miles (a subdued Jack Black), a film composer who just lost his actress girlfriend. Each relationship ends accordingly, and it will not spoil anything for you to know it’s all a pretty happy scene.

What is not so happy is the construction of the movie. Meyer’s script has no forward momentum, and each scene has a weird template: bits of dialogue are always capped off by a speech. So, two characters get together, chat for a little bit, and then one gives a pep talk. Odd.

On the acting side, Jude Law is as charming and as slight as ever. I’m not sure what role would suit him. He’s the light leading man type—David Niven in another era—who may always find work but never really command the screen.

This leaves Diaz and Winslet to do most of the heavy lifting, if you can call it that. Meyers doesn’t really have them act like grown women, actually; they giggle and squeal and, of course, cry quite a bit. Meyers also has a slightly disconcerting habit of shooting Diaz in extreme close-up several times. I marveled at the texture of her skin in those scenes, because it seemed extraordinarily perfect, but I have to admit I lost track of what was being said.

“The Holiday” is not worth $8 a ticket at the local multiplex, but may be a fine movie to rent on DVD on a cold winter night. You can fast-forward when the tears start flowing.