"The Holiday" isn't just a romantic comedy, it's a romantic fantasy in which Californian Cameron Diaz finds a tipsy stranger on the doorstep of the quaint English cottage where she's staying.

	Jude Law and Cameron Diaz: Fluffy and phony in "The Holiday." Click photo for larger image. 'The Holiday' Rating: PG-13 for sexual content and some strong language. Starring: Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet. Director: Nancy Meyers. Web site: http://www.sonypictures.com/movies

The visitor is played by Jude Law, who is a book editor, a man who admits to weeping easily and openly and who has a sympathetic family situation designed to evoke an immediate "Aaaw." Did I mention he's played by Jude Law? When he says Diaz is lovely, she responds, "So are you."

Even by fluffy holiday standards, this Nancy Meyers movie is about as real as that 1970s Christmas tree you wrestled out of the box and assembled by its color-coded, bristly branches. It can reference Cary Grant and "meet-cute" and classic films with spunky women all it wants, it's still not one of those movies.

That's not for lack of trying or a good cast, particularly Winslet, who has had a heckuva year, playing Anne Stanton in "All the King's Men," a feisty female rodent in "Flushed Away" and an unhappy suburban mother in "Little Children" (not yet in Pittsburgh).

"The Holiday" stars Diaz as Amanda, a California workaholic and successful single woman who owns an ad agency that creates movie previews. After her boyfriend confesses to infidelity, she pops him in the nose and looks online for a Christmas getaway.

It's there that she discovers Iris (Winslet), a heartbroken single woman who writes the wedding column for a London newspaper. The women decide to swap houses for the holidays.

Kate Winslet and Jack Black spend Christmas in Los Angeles. Click photo for larger image.

Iris leaves snowy England for sunny Los Angeles, where she finds a house and pool that could land on the cover of any design magazine, a sweet elderly neighbor (Eli Wallach) who is a famous screenwriter and a composer named Miles (Jack Black) who becomes a friend.

Amanda lands, for two weeks, at a charming cottage 40 minutes outside of London. It looks as if it could have been the model for a Thomas Kinkade print, and it comes with a Mini Cooper, a cute dog and, of course, the stranger named Graham (Law) who drops by one night.

The women compress a year's worth of living and decision-making into two weeks as they loathe or luxuriate in their new surroundings and weigh new and old companions and patterns.

"The Holiday" was written and directed by Meyers, who may be queen of chick flicks: "The Parent Trap," "What Women Want," "Something's Gotta Give." She also co-wrote "Private Benjamin," "Baby Boom" and "Father of the Bride."

Somehow, Meyers the writer got the better of Meyers the director. How else to explain the 138-minute running time? Unless you're making "Love, Actually," with enough characters to populate a small English village, you don't need a movie longer than "Flags of Our Fathers" or "Apocalypto."

The deck is stacked for Diaz -- whose Amanda draws a royal flush in the poker game of vacation life -- while Winslet's character appears to be far too smart to act like a lovesick schoolgirl over a man who's a heel.

Black, who could have used a little bit of his Tenacious D lunacy and energy, has an amusing musical interlude in a video store, while Law simply has to be dreamy -- and is. Wallach, dispensing advice to Iris about life and the movies, quietly steals his scenes.

It would seem that Meyers wanted to make an old-fashioned romantic comedy (it has a PG-13 rating, which means it tells more than it shows) but the result is formulaic and phony. And no amount of crying, conga lines, cute children, champagne or Christmas cheer can change that.