The Holiday is the latest in Christmas treacle from its creator, Nancy Meyers, whose past writing-directing credits have included Something’s Gotta Give, The Parent Trap, What Women Want (director only), and Private Benjamin (writer only). The Holiday tells the story of two women, both losers in love, who decide to swap homes for the Christmas season to help them get over their recently failed relationships.

Amanda (Cameron Diaz) lives in a large mansion in Los Angeles and is a successful producer of movie trailers. After depriving her live-in boyfriend, Ethan (Edward Burns), of sex and affection for six months, she is horrified to hear that he has cheated on her with his 24-year-old assistant. She boots him out and decides to take a last-minute vacation as consolation. On the Internet she stumbles across Iris (Kate Winslet), whose nice, secluded country house in Surrey, England, sounds wonderful to Amanda.

Iris has been involved in an unrequited love affair with a fellow writer, Jasper (Rufus Sewell), at the Daily Telegraph, where they both work. At the office Christmas party, she discovers that he’s engaged to another Telegraph worker. Devastated, she quickly agrees to exchange residences with Amanda. Neither woman informs her family and friends that she is making the switch, which nicely sets up the film’s premise of each being injected into the other’s world and falling in love far from home: Amanda with Iris’s brother, Graham (Jude Law), and Iris with Amanda’s coworker and film-score composer, Miles (Jack Black).

The Holiday begins with much promise. Meyers has written some funny and poignant lines, but most of them are lost in a sappy, overlong story that had me cringing at some of the dialogue, and looking around the theater to see if any acquaintances had caught me attending this sentimental schlock.

The romance between Amanda and Graham is tedious. Despite tumbling into bed on their first meeting, each is so worried about making a poor second, third, and fourth impression that neither can speak to the other without committing some faux pas. When she isn’t twittering nervously on, Diaz spends most of her screen time smiling -- evidently, we’re supposed to be smitten by her pearly whites. (I suppose Diaz should smile; her real-life cosmetic nose surgery has been successful, and she looks better for it.) Jude Law plays the sort of decent, vulnerable, self-deprecating British guy perfected by Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill. But Graham’s admission that he weeps like a baby at all films, weddings, etc. neither charms nor endears, and seeing him after a good cry, when he thinks Amanda has left him, had even me loudly protesting, "C’mon, man. Get a grip!"

Iris and Miles’s romance is easier to watch, but I dozed off during a couple of long-winded speeches. Meyers interweaves another storyline concerning an old screenwriter, Arthur Abbott (Eli Wallach), whom Iris and Miles befriend, but this feels like a diversion that mostly serves to balance the screen time between Amanda and Iris. And as Miles explains great Hollywood movie scores to Iris and Arthur reminisces about old Hollywood, The Holiday becomes self-indulgent, Meyers preaching about great moviemaking, of which The Holiday most certainly is not an example.

The film could have been saved by good and ruthless editing. Rarely do I feel that films are too long; usually, they seem cut short to appeal to modern moviegoers’ restlessness and to ensure at least two shows per evening at the local multiplex. But at 138 minutes, The Holiday felt much too long. I was bored.

I returned home, hoping to watch the Ultimate Fighting Championship on TV -- a direct reaction to the sickly sweetness I’d just endured. Alas, there was no violence on telly that night. My Christmas wish is that Columbia Pictures does not release an extended director’s cut on the DVD edition of The Holiday.

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