First thing’s first, I went into this with my eyes wide open.
I knew what it was.
Every year, these holiday movies tumble onto the Netflix platform like candy bars with an unsettling aftertaste. Every year, I tell myself, Don’t do it, don’t do it, Meesh, and every year, when it starts getting dark at 4:30 and the early winter nights tap at my window with strange, existential mutterings, I inevitably pull up the queue and, wearily, press play. Do you not see? When it comes to these Netflix holiday movies, I am but a weak fool, a jester in the court of commercial media that recycles offensive tropes and garbage cans of gender essentialism.
Anyway, here we are, folks.
Holidate (2020) has a mean streak. Rather than embrace the inherent cheesiness of its holiday rom-com genre, slurp it up with a spoon, and offer up something warm and silly, it hates itself. There’s a self-loathing in this movie that makes it weirdly dark. The whole time, I wished I were watching one of Vanessa Hudgens’ secret twin swap movies instead. At least she gets to run a country.
After a tough break-up, Sloane (Emma Roberts) finds herself single on Christmas. Her mother, like all of the mothers in this suburban, candy-cane alternate universe, is utterly devastated by her daughter’s status as a single lady. Even though Sloane’s older sister spends the entire film expressing her disillusionment with married life and children, even though Sloane’s younger brother proposes to a girl he has only known for three months, Sloane is still, somehow, the person her mother must “fix.” Being single is to be broken, duh.
Soon after, Sloane runs into another sad-sack single person in the mall—a very tall Australian named Jackson (Luke Bracey) who is supposed to be charming but mainly struggles through three or four facial expressions at most. Their banter strives, desperately, to achieve something resembling wit, but comes across as mean-spirited.
As Sloane belligerently tries to return a Christmas gift at customer service, she says, “They didn’t come with a receipt. Just the assumption that I would be alone forever and, apparently, gorge myself into the size of a lumberjack.”
Jackson smirks at her and responds, “Nailed it.”
Eventually, they bond over their sorrowful, pathetic lives as blond people. Sloane and Jackson promise to be each other’s “holidates” for the rest of the year to circumvent the pressures of finding a “real” date. They also explicitly promise not to fall prey to the “friends with benefits” conundrum. This is an obvious storytelling maneuver, one that is meant to demonstrate that Sloane and Jackson are not hopeless romantics or cheeseballs, but sharp-toothed protagonists who are—like the audience—aware of the pitfalls of “friends with benefits” and the tendency to fall in love and stuff, which is so gross, guys, omg. Because Sloane and Jackson explicitly comment on this cliché, we are meant to now trust them or, at least, relate to them. The movie thinks, We’re being subversive! Nailed it.
When they meet at a club for New Year’s Eve, Jackson openly comments on Sloane’s body and then grins, relieved that he doesn’t have to pretend he’s a “good guy.” Sloane is flattered by his remarks and tells him that she’s glad she can wear a “slutty dress” because she doesn’t have to worry about “giving him the wrong idea.” They are… not real people. It’s not that I don’t see what the writing is trying to do. It’s just that it doesn’t do it well.
The movie does not want to be schmaltzy. It does not want to fall under the “sentimental rom-com” umbrella. What does it mean, exactly, to be a sentimental romantic comedy?
It is Meg Ryan listening to Tom Hanks share his woes as a grieving widow on the radio and then, without knowing him at all, flying across the country to find him.
It is Andie MacDowell staring up at Hugh Grant, soaked by the rain, and woodenly saying, “Is it raining? I hadn’t noticed.”
It is Keanu Reeves patiently waiting two years to meet Sandra Bullock after swapping letters via a convoluted time-travel mailbox.
It is two leads who possess unyielding hope and grace, stars in their eyes, fighting for each other, over and over again, even when they do not really know each other—they fight because they sense, somehow, intuitively, that they will eventually reach the heights of an infallible love. Some rom-coms do this perfectly. Some don’t.
Holidate doesn’t want to do anything.
The movie tries to subvert the mechanics of its rom-com structure, but it does so by relying on the same tired, sexist stereotypes that many of its counterparts employed. Much of its bawdy humor and bursts of misogyny reminded me of the visual atrocities known as The Break Up (2006), starring Jennifer Aniston and Vince Vaughn, and The Ugly Truth (2009), starring Katherine Heigl and Gerard Butler. Basically, it’s doing the same thing as those other movies but flapping its arms and saying, No! I’m edgy! I’m different!
Here, Jackson ostensibly attempts to undermine the expectations of the male love interest. He does not try to woo Sloane, but actively maintains disinterest. Sloane, too, is meant to be “different,” a cool girl who appreciates unsolicited sexualized comments about her appearance from a guy and who loves being “slutty.”
Listen, Sloane is actually commenting on real-world sexism—women do worry about slut-shaming and women do alter their dress to combat unfair levels of physical scrutiny. The virgin/whore dichotomy is a thing. But neither Sloane nor the movie are critiquing this reality. They’re both shrugging and saying, WhatEVER! Sloane can be a “slut” now and Jackson can treat her like a “slut” because they’re not romantic love interests. Subversive!
Yet, contrary to its self-indulgent shoulder-patting, misogyny is not revolutionary. Jackson celebrating the fact that he can disrespect Sloane because he’s not trying to sleep with her is not subversive. Sloane un-ironically linking tight dresses with “sluttiness” is not subversive. It is the most conventional mode of behavior in our patriarchal culture. It is exceedingly normalized. It is basic, y’all.
Other things happen, including a surprising amount of gross-out body humor, such as Jackson’s finger exploding off his hand due to beach fireworks. Later, Sloane accidentally consumes a large quantity of laxatives (I will not torture you with the lazy contrivances that led to this mistake) and wobbles to her door in a corseted pirate costume, begging Jackson to rip off her dress so she can use the toilet. During this particular misadventure, I was actually pleasantly surprised by Jackson’s good-natured humor and his decision to take care of her—see, that’s what I wanted, Netflix. But these small moments of affection and sensitivity are compulsively peeled back into something cruder. The movie so desperately wants to be ironic that it ruins any interest I have in the characters’ relationship. It drops sprinkles of respect in a scene here or there, then remembers it wants to be “edgy” and throws a bizarre nitrogen bomb in the middle of a conversation.
When Sloane and Jackson briefly commiserate about relationships, they regurgitate sexist stereotypes that immediately transported me to a movie from the early aughts. They say all the things I heard growing up from films like He’s Just Not That Into You (2009) and What’s Your Number? (2011) and How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (2003)—women sleep with guys and immediately grow attached, while guys transform into closed-off automatons who don’t want to snuggle. Blah, blah, blah. Gross generalizations, of course, and their regressive conversation makes me want to claw my eyes out. The movie does destabilize this stereotype by then having Sloane and Jackson embody the opposite tropes—Jackson sleeps with Sloane and ~feels things~ while Sloane responds coldly and kicks him out of bed.
But the thing is—I don’t need to see the sexist thing to know the sexist thing exists. I’m so tired of having to sit through writing that plays into harmful characterizations just so the writing can then pull a “gotcha!” Like, just do the “gotcha!” I don’t need to hear someone say “Women are vapid whores!” and then cut to a group of women analyzing The Brothers Karamazov in a Pottery Barn living room. (Side note: Has anyone ever finished that book? Asking for a friend.)
Anyway, Jackson ultimately yells at Sloane in a supermarket on Thanksgiving, condemning her intimacy issues, and storms out. I want to care about this, but I really, really don’t.
In the end, Sloane does that thing—you know, the end-of-the-romantic-comedy last-ditch effort thing. She pushes her way through a crowd of shoppers in the mall, interrupts a Christmas concert by hopping onstage, and declares her love for Jackson via glittery microphone. The shoppers sigh and clutch their hearts at all the right moments. Jackson freezes, listening to her proclamation. Sloane cries a little. Then, everyone waits with bated breath to see what Jackson will do.
He says, and I quote, “Nah.”
The shoppers gasp.
But don’t worry, folks, he was just kidding. He promptly turns back to her and they kiss. Again, his “nah” is meant to be funny, an open rejection of the confessional trope, but the movie doesn’t really mean it, Jackson doesn’t really mean it, and they return to their regularly-scheduled happy ending. It’s a spineless attempt at irony.
Also, in real life, I have a hard time picturing a woman shaking her head affectionately at a guy who says “nah” after she just vomited raw vulnerability in front of a huge crowd.
Listen, I should’ve just re-watched the Vanessa Hudgens movie where she falls in love with a knight from the fourteenth century. That’s on me. I’ll take an L for this, everyone.
Holidate is a holi-don’t.
I know, I know…that’s so bad. BUT HOW COULD I NOT.