Movie Reviews
'The Holdovers': A predictable letdown of a film – review
Alexander Payne’s latest movie, The Holdovers, which opens throughout Israel on February 8, is getting major Oscar buzz and it’s the kind of character-driven, low-key drama of redemption and friendship that could provide a nice contrast to the overblown, overhyped movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer that got most of the attention this year.
If only it were better.
It’s one of those wintry movies about misfits bonding during the Christmas season, and while it has characters you care about more as it goes along, it takes its time and it’s so clear that the bonding is on the way that you may grow impatient with the slow pacing. It’s disappointing because Payne has often made enjoyable, memorable movies, especially his early features, Election and Citizen Ruth.
Why The Holdovers falls flat
Election brutally satirized a high-school student (Reese Witherspoon) determined to win a school election at all costs, while Citizen Ruth, featuring Laura Dern, subversively mined the politics of the political controversy around the abortion movement for comedy. Payne also made Sideways, the story of two middle-aged men who are disappointed with their lives and who take what they hope will be a cathartic journey through California wine country, which was a breakout role for Paul Giamatti, best known today for the TV series, Billions, who also stars in The Holdovers.
In The Holdovers, Giamatti – considered one of the frontrunners for the Best Actor Oscar – plays Paul Hunham, a very strict teacher at a New England boys’ prep school in 1970 who is universally disliked and disrespected by the students, the other teachers, and his boss. He revels in giving his students – most of whom he considers lazy, overprivileged idiots – failing grades, even if they are wealthy or politically connected. No one would ever consider Paul overprivileged. He was a scholarship student, went to Harvard, and came back to teach at his old prep school – and rarely leaves the campus. He has no family, no friends, and no relationships with women. Oh, and due to a medical condition, he smells bad. Before you can think what a lovable loser he is, he gets stuck looking after “the holdovers” – the kids who can’t go home for the holidays – over the Christmas break.
It goes without saying that he is an unrelenting jerk as he makes these sad students, who are missing their families (some live far away, some have parents who don’t want them around), spend their days studying and exercising, with no chance for any fun. It’s all about painting Paul – at the beginning – as what the late New Yorker critic Pauline Kael would have called “a parody of an anti-life monster,” a quote from her review of Terms of Endearment, in which she was describing Shirley MacLaine’s character, but which also applies here.
Eventually, all the students get a reprieve and are able to leave, except for Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, who should have gotten an Oscar nod but didn’t). He is Paul’s brightest student and though he originally seemed like one of the entitled egomaniacs Paul loathes, at the last minute, his mother tells him that she and his new stepfather are going to the Caribbean for a vacation without him. This punctures Angus’s brash façade and while he rebels against Paul’s rules, it’s clear that he is acting out due to his feelings of abandonment.
There is a third character who is stuck at the school with them, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who is virtually guaranteed an Oscar for this performance), the school cook who is mourning the recent loss of her only son in Vietnam. She is wise and noble throughout, with moments of heartbreaking vulnerability. Randolph, who has appeared in The Idol and Only Murders in the Building, plays this role so well you will only realize how cliched the character is after you leave the theater. Despite her pain, she manages to push Paul and Angus closer together, making them realize what is truly important in life.
Eventually, the long-foreshadowed bonding comes as the teacher and student reveal their secrets and admit who they really are, in a series of scenes that do become progressively more touching. Mary finds some comfort in her connection to the two of them and they all embrace the redemption that was hovering on the horizon from the movie’s opening moments.
The three leads work well together and you will root for them, although there is a predictability and heavy-handedness to the story that makes it less moving than it would otherwise be. There are some good actors in supporting roles who don’t have much to do, among them Carrie Preston of The Good Wife who plays a down-to-earth faculty member who moonlights as a waitress. The ’70s setting is used cleverly and the opening credits make it look like a film that was actually made 50-plus years ago, which is a fun way to start it off.
But for all its virtues, The Holdovers invites unfortunate comparisons to the ne plus ultra of teacher-student bonding movies, Wonder Boys with Michael Douglas and Tobey Maguire, based on and very faithful to the great novel by Michael Chabon of the same title. While I really wanted to like The Holdovers and I did enjoy quite a bit of it, it was hard to banish memories from the much funnier and more moving Wonder Boys as The Holdovers limped along.
Desert Warrior, 2026.
Directed by Rupert Wyatt.
Starring Anthony Mackie, Aiysha Hart, Ben Kingsley, Ghassan Massoud, Sharlto Copley, Sami Bouajila, Lamis Ammar, Géza Röhrig, Numan Acar, Nabil Elouahabi, Hakeem Jomah, Ramsey Faragallah, Saïd Boumazoughe, and Soheil Bostani.
SYNOPSIS:
An honorable and mysterious rogue, known as Hanzala, makes himself an enemy of the Emperor Kisra after he helps a fugitive king and princess in the desert.
With aspirations of being a historical epic harkening back to the sword and sandal blockbusters of yesteryear, Rupert Wyatt’s seventeenth-century Arabia tale is about as generic and epically dull as one would expect from a film plainly titled Desert Warrior. Yes, there appear to be real locations here, and there are some admittedly sweeping shots of various tribes storming into battle on horseback and camels, but it’s all in service of a mess that is both miscast and questionable as the work of a filmmaking team of mostly white creatives.
The story of Emperor Kisraa (Ben Kingsley, a distracting presence even with only one or two scenes) rounding up women from other tribes to be his concubines, which inevitably became the catalyst for a revolution led by Princess Hind (Aiysha Hart), uniting all the divided clans and strategizing battle plans for flanking and poisoning, is undeniably ripe for cinematic treatment. The problem is that what’s here from Rupert Wyatt (and screenwriters Erica Beeney, Gary Ross, and David Self) is less than nothing in the primary creative process; no one seems to have a connection to Arabic heritage or culture, but they have made a flat-out boring film that is often narratively incoherent.
Following the death of her father and escaping the clutches of oppression, the honorable Princess Hind joins forces with a troubled, nameless bandit played by Anthony Mackie (he totally belongs here…), who seems to be here solely to give the movie some star power boost without running the risk of white savior accusations. Whatever the case may be, it’s jarring, but not quite as disorienting as how little screen time he has despite being billed as the lead and how little characterization he has. It is, however, equally disorienting as some of the other names that show up along the way.
As for the other factions, Princess Hind talks to them one by one, giving the film an adventure feel that fails to capitalize on using beautiful scenery in striking or visually poignant ways at almost every turn; the leaders of these tribes also often have no character. There also isn’t much of an understanding of why these tribes are at odds with one another. This movie is filled with dialogue that consistently and shockingly amounts to vague nothingness. Nevertheless, each tribe doesn’t take much convincing to begin with, meaning that not only is the film repetitive, but it’s also lifeless when characters are in conversation.
That Desert Warrior does occasionally spring to life, and a bloated 2+ running time is a small miracle. This is typically accomplished through the occasional fight scene between factions that also serves to demonstrate Princess Hind coming into her own as a warrior. When the tribes are united in a massive-scale battle, and that plan is unfolding step by step, one certainly sees why someone would want to tell this story and pull it off with such spectacle. However, this film is as dry as the desert itself.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=embed/playlist
‘4’, the opening track on Richard D James’ (Aphex Twin) self titled 1996 album is a piece of music that beautifully balances the chaotic with the serene, the oppressive and the freeing. It’s a trick that James has pulled off multiple times throughout his career and it is a huge part of what makes him such an iconic and influential artist. Many people have laid the “next Aphex Twin” label on musicians who do things slightly different and when you actually hear their music you realise that, once again, the label is flawed and applied with a lazy attitude. Why mention this? Well, it turns out we’ve been looking for James’ heir apparent in the wrong artform. We’ve so zoned in on music that we’ve not noticed that another Celtic son of Cornwall is rewriting an art form with that highwire balancing act between chaos and beauty. That artist is writer, director and composer Mark Jenkin who over his last two feature films has announced himself as an idiosyncratic voice who is creating his very own language within the world of cinema. Jenkin’s films are often centred around coastal towns or islands and whilst they are experimental or even unsettling, there is always a big heart at the centre of the narrative. A heart that cares about family, tradition, culture, and the pull of ‘home’. Even during the horror of 2022’s brilliant Enys Men you were anchored by the vulnerability and determination of its main protagonist.
This month sees the release of Jenkin’s latest feature film, Rose of Nevada, which is set in a fractured and diminished Cornish coastal town. One day the fishing boat of the film’s title arrives back in harbour after being missing for thirty years. The boat is unoccupied. And frankly that is all the information you are going to get because to discuss any more plot would be unfair on you and disrespectful to Jenkin and the team behind the film. You the viewer should be the one who decides what it is about because thematically there are so many wonderful threads to pull on. This writer’s opinions on what it is about have ranged from a theme of sacrifice for the good of a community to the conflict within when part of you wants to run away from your roots whilst the other half longs to stay and be a lifelong part of its tapestry. Is it about Brexit? Could be. Is it about our own relationships with time and our curation of memory? Could be. Is it about both the positives and negatives of nostalgia? Could be. As a side note, anyone in their mid-40s, like me, who came of age in the 1990s will certainly find moments of warm recognition. Is the film about ghosts and how they haunt families? Could be…I think you get the point.
The elements that make the film so well balanced between chaos and calm are many. It is there in the differing performances between the brilliant two lead actors George MacKay and Callum Turner. It is there in the sound design which fluctuates from being unbearably harsh and metallic, to lulling and warm. It is there in the editing where short, sharp close ups on seemingly unimportant factors are counterbalanced with shots that are held for just that little bit too long. For a film set around the sea, it is apt that it can make you feel like you’re rolling on a stomach churning storm one minute, or a calming low tide the next. Dialogue can be front and centre or blurred and buried under static. One shot is bathed in harsh sunlight whilst the next can be drowned in interior shadows.
Rose of Nevada is Mark Jenkin’s most ambitious film to date yet he has not lost a single iota of innovation, singularity of vision or his gift for telling the most human of stories. It is a film that will tell you different things each time you see it and whilst there are moments that can confuse or beguile, there is so much empathy and love that it can leave you crying tears of emotional understanding. It is chaotic. It is beautiful. It is life……
Rose of Nevada is released on the 24th April.
Mark Jenkin Instagram | Threads
Released through the BFI – Instagram | Facebook
Review by Simon Tucker
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