Actor Paul Giamatti and director Alexander Payne are reliable filmmaking professionals who, more often than not, deliver the storytelling goods. Their latest collaboration is The Holdovers (USA, 2023) – like many films this year, the theater box-office numbers are almost irrelevant to its streaming audience, which is slowly escalating even as we speak. Like CODA from two years ago, it’s a comedic crowd-pleaser featuring just enough intelligence, eccentricity and empathy to relate a good story in a way that will challenge or offend absolutely no one.
It’s 1970 or thereabouts, and Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, the tough ‘ancient civilizations’ teacher at Barton Academy, a high-end college prep school whose president isn’t above turning a blind eye to bad students with filthy rich donor parents. This, of course, insults Hunham’s high standards; he flunked an especially dim and irresponsible student last year and cost the school millions from his infuriated father. One of the faculty, Endicott (Bill Mootos) is required to stay over Christmas vacation to supervise those students staying at the school – there are always a few who can’t travel or have nowhere to go for many reasons. But Mr. Endicott has bailed, telling the headmaster, Woodrup (Andrew Garman) that his mother has contracted lupus, and he’s, well, unavailable, y’know. Hunham lives there anyway, and this’ll be a small measure of revenge for Woodrup, so Hunham is drafted.
One of the first things we see in the film is a small men’s choir rehearsing Christmas carols just before holiday – they’re very good, attentive and orderly, and the conductor/professor seems like a gracious nice guy. In contrast, the classroom of Mr. Hunham is redolent with impending doom. His students haven’t done well on his final, and most grouse in fury that Hunham’s grading standards are keeping them out of the really good colleges, whether they deserve to go there or not. Mr. Hunham is pitiless. There are four holdovers this year, and Hunham’s most resentful final exam victim (Brady Hepner) is one of them. Later, another of Hunham’s students, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) is stranded at the last minute by his mom and newlywed stepdad, who have changed their plans. Mr. Tully, incidentally, did well on his final, perhaps the only pupil who did, and Hunham’s charges are now five.
Also spending the holiday at Barton is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). She’s been the cafeteria manager for years, and was able to give her son Curtis an education there because of it. But with this being the seventies, Curtis is sent to Vietnam, killed, and Mary is left with thoughts and prayers.
Circumstances conspire to lure Mr. Hunham, Mary and Angus out of the school (the others have been, predictably, transported elsewhere. Rich Dads, right…?), first to visit the school’s small town, then to a Christmas party thrown by another Barton employee (the always refreshing and reliable Carrie Preston) and finally on a small but eventful overnight field trip to Boston. It’s refreshing for the film, as well, to pull Hunham back out into the real world on far more equal footing with Mr. Tully (and Mary), and experience a salvo of unpredictable revelations from each of them. Until these later scenes, the film was pleasant enough, if a bit maudlin and predictable. But Giamatti and Dominic Sessa really dig much deeper together here, and they pass the ball well back and forth even when they’re not playing directly to each other.
The film is extremely likeable, but my recurring complaint is that there’s no earthly reason for this film, or many others these days, to be over two hours long. Eigil Bryld’s cinematography is lovely and unobtrusive, and there’s at least some effort not to lean on the Decade’s Greatest Hits for the soundtrack. It’s all nice work, and there may be a few Oscar acting nominations here, but this year is loaded with really good performances, and, for The Holdovers, those are long odds.
One of our contenders for an International Film Oscar this year is Godland (Vanskabte Land in Danish, Volađa Land in Icelandic) (Iceland, 2022). This film is over 2 hours long as well, but director Hlynur Pálmason earns the additional length with a well-considered storytelling pace, scale and rhythm. Young Danish priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) is being sent by his elderly bishop from Denmark to Iceland to establish a church in the southeastern part of the country. After sailing across the North Sea, he and his translator (Hilmar Guðjónsson) land on the southern coast, met by his Icelandic guide, Ragnar (Ingvar Sigurdsson), and the crew of laborers who will traverse the land over midsummer to arrive at the small village in time to build the church before winter.
Lucas is also a photographer – one of director Pálmason’s narrative conceits is that his filmed story is based on wet-plate photographs found years later in Iceland. What and who Lucas deigns to photograph becomes an unspoken issue; the crew already sees the Danish emissary as another religious colonizer, and Lucas’ humorless arrogance and language difficulties don’t endear him either. His communication problems with Ragnar, even with a translator, escalate, even as both men try to keep things civil. Lucas becomes a woozy and sickly tenderfoot liability early on, and he insists on a few decisions that put the party in jeopardy, costing them supplies, a few horses and a tragic bit more. The boxy camera he carries on his back, and the large, heavy eight-foot wooden cross he’s brought for the church, both become additional burdens for the horses and Ragnar’s crew. When they finally arrive at the site, after weeks and weeks, Lucas is flat on his back on a horse-drawn sled, barely conscious. A prominent villager, the widower Carl (Jacob Lohmann) and his two daughters, Anna (Vic Carmen Sonne) and Ida (Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir), nurse him back to health in their home. At one point, Carl asks Lucas why he didn’t just sail the rest of the way up the coast to reduce the arduous trip. Lucas replies he wanted to learn the land, take his photographs and meet people on his way. Carl and Ragnar remain polite, but they’re clearly nonplussed at his ignorance and entitlement.
The riveting narrative and able performers are compelling, but much like Pálmason’s Werner Herzog and John Ford influences (and a bit of Peter Greenaway as well), the stark and, at times, deranging environment is its own character, hauntingly captured in Maria von Hausswolff’s gorgeous camerawork, and by Alex Zhang Hungtai’s arid and evocative musical score. Ragnar’s demeanor can be primitive and provincial, but he also personifies and accepts the sinister moral erosion that seems inevitable in that cold, cruel, lonely place, and its osmosis into his native culture and values. His dismissiveness of the out-of-his-league Lucas starts to do internal battle with a long-submerged desire for hope and redemption.
Historically, among International Film nominations, there haven’t been many surprise winners, and this year will doubtless be no exception. This year is the year of The Zone Of Interest, Jonathan Glazer’s German-language submission by the U.K. Nonetheless, Godland is an involving experience, visually and thematically, and is well worth seeing on the biggest screen available to you.
Periscope In The Bathtub 