On Friday night, I could feel a cold coming on. It hit me full force overnight and by Saturday morning, I had a sore throat and was sneezing repeatedly, which pretty much made it the perfect day to stay home and watch a movie or two. I recorded The Holiday a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been wanting to see it for a couple of years now. Turned out to be an awesome move. [By the way, Amazon.com is selling this DVD for $6.99 right now, so you might want to pick up a copy.] The plot is about two women, Iris (played by Kate Winslet), and Amanda (played by Cameron Diaz), who decide to swap homes for two weeks during the Christmas season. They are both coming out of relationships, or in Iris’ case—an attempted relationship, and they both just want to get away from their relationship problems for a while. So Iris travels to L.A. and Amanda travels to England.
As I’ve said here before, I don’t really do movie reviews here as much as I do scene reviews. That’s what I want to do this time as well.
Early in this movie, as Iris narrates for the viewer, she is lamenting the fact that the man she has loved for the past three years doesn’t really love her in return. Here’s how she describes how she feels:
“. . . and then there’s another kind of love—the cruelest kind; the one that almost kills its victims. It’s call unrequited love—of that, I am an expert. Most love stories are about people who fall in love with each other, but what about the rest of us? What about our stories—those of us who fall in love alone? We are the victims of the one-sided affair. We are the cursed of the loved ones. We are the unloved ones. The walking wounded. The handicapped without the advantage of a great parking space.”
Iris has a point. I love movies in which love is requited, but you don’t see many movies with unrequited love. Yet, how many of us deal with it on a daily basis? I certainly have in the past. I’d be embarrassed to tell you how many years of my life I’ve spent waiting for one person or another to finally see the light when I should have known that if the light was going to come on, it probably would have happened much sooner.
Of course, that doesn’t mean it always happens quickly. But after somebody you love makes it clear that he or she just isn’t interested, it is so hard to walk away. That is what Iris faces. And she finally makes the right decision. And in it, she finds freedom.
