Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti Reunite for ‘The Holdovers,’ Making a Few New Holiday Friends Along the Way

October 24, 2023

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Hold it! (CREDIT: Seacia Pavao / © 2023 FOCUS FEATURES LLC)

Starring: Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Carrie Preston, Andrew Garman, Naheem Garcia, Michael Provost, Brady Hepner, Jim Kaplan, Ian Dolley, Gillian Vigman, Tate Donovan

Director: Alexander Payne

Running Time: 133 Minutes

Rating: R for Cranky Curmudgeonliness and Teenage Boys Being Teenage Boys

Release Date: October 27, 2023 (Theaters)

What’s It About?: Merry Christmas! Why, it’s still merely October, you say? Well, having the holidays thrusted upon you a couple months early is surely a more bearable fate than that borne by Barton Academy prep school student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) and his hidebound history teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) in the early 1970s. Angus is stuck at school over the winter break because his mom (Gillian Vigman) and stepdad (Tate Donovan) are too busy jet-setting, while Paul pulls the short end of the faculty stick as the guardian for all the kids who don’t have anywhere else to go. This is a formula that’s promising an explosive clash of strong personalities, but maybe head of the cafeteria Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) can help to extinguish the eruptions.

What Made an Impression?: Not-So-Hidden Layers: If you’re 18 or younger, then Mr. Hunham will probably strike you as an absolute nightmare. I’m pretty sure everyone had at least one teacher who was so soul-crushingly set in his ways. But older viewers will likely be more willing to extend him if not affection, then certainly understanding. Right from the jump, he reveals that he’s more complicated than the stodgy traditionalist he’s presented as, and obviously a character played by Paul Giamatti and directed by Alexander Payne was always going to be plenty three-dimensional. The specifics of those dimensions mainly have to do with his frustration that’s directed at a world that appears to be falling apart as well as all the young, privileged kids who are blissfully unaware of their inoculation against all that.
Kindred Spirits: When Angus and Paul’s antagonism eventually begins to soften into something resembling mentorship, it’s because of that time-honored tradition of seeing themselves in each other. As it turns out, they’ve both been handicapped by some pretty bum deals in life, and they go about their days with simmering anger shaping pretty much every one of their actions. They’re the kind of people who secretly shoulder burdens all by themselves, only to generate a ton of sympathy when the truths are uncovered. They go through quite a rocky start, but it’s ultimately a blessing that they’ve found each other.
A True Three-Hander: I can imagine a version of The Holdovers that features just Angus and Paul as its only two characters, and that version probably would have been pretty satisfying. But the version we actually get is even more so, thanks to the straight-shooting performance of Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Mary is notably more emotionally open than everyone around her, which allows her to serve as the enzyme to get Paul to open up, at least a little bit. There’s a sweet early scene in which he joins her while she’s watching The Newlywed Game. He’s never watched it before, so he pinpoints the premise as a recipe for disaster, which she assures him is exactly the point. And ultimately this movie demonstrates that being open to even small new experiences like this one can start nudging us towards exactly where we need to go.

The Holdovers is Recommended If You Like: Rushmore, Armageddon Time, The Way Way Back

Grade: 4.5 out of 5 History Exams

This Is a Movie Review: ‘Forever My Girl’ Could Be Charming If It Weren’t So Careless with Its Emotional Beats

January 18, 2018

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CREDIT: Jacob Yakob/Roadside Attractions/LD Entertainment

This post was originally published on News Cult in January 2018.

Starring: Alex Roe, Jessica Rothe, John Benjamin Hickey, Abby Ryder Fortson, Tyler Riggs, Peter Cambor, Gillian Vigman

Director: Bethany Ashton Wolf

Running Time: 104 Minutes

Rating: PG for Keeping Deep-Seated Anger and Frustration Mostly Polite

Release Date: January 19, 2018

In gooey romances like Forever My Girl, we always find our way back to the ones who we truly love and who truly love us. But I wonder how someone like country music superstar Liam Page (Alex Roe) ever could have lost himself in the first place. Because when the facts are laid out, he just does not seem like the type of guy who would ever want to leave his lovely fiancée Josie (Jessica Rothe) at the altar. And when I ponder what it means that he in fact does do that, the implications are quite troubling, and I wish writer/director Bethany Ashton Wolf (adapting the book of the same name by Heidi McLaughlin) had shown more care in reckoning with all that.

Eight years have passed since Liam has bailed on marriage, cutting off all contact with Josie, his dad (John Benjamin Hickey), his friends, and everyone else in his hometown of Saint Augustine, Louisiana (referred to as just “Saint” by the locals) in the process. Now he is selling out stadiums, thanks to the success of his banal party-bro country songs with lyrics like “don’t water down my whiskey.” But he has always held on to a sort of talisman from his past life: his old flip phone from high school, as a voicemail saved there contains his last communication from Josie, sent to him just a few days after he jilted her. When he hears that one of his friends has died in an accident, he abandons the last stop of his tour to return home, and I get the sense that he’s been wanting to escape the big time for a while (more on that later).

As these stories tend to go, it turns out that Josie has a 7-year-old daughter, Billy (a poised Abby Ryder Fortson), and of course Liam is the dad, but because of his town-wide ghosting, he never knew about her until now. It wouldn’t be the best idea for Liam to suddenly become a major part of Billy’s life, considering how disruptive that can be for a young child, not to mention Liam is a not-very-independent adult who can barely take care of himself. But of course, you can see where this is going: Liam learns how to be a good dad, he and Billy bond over music, and he and Josie fall back in love, because they never really fell out of love in the first place.

While none of this reinvents the wheel (in fact, it rolls right along with it), it is not necessarily a problem. What is a problem, though, is the mishap that threatens to upend this new stability for such a silly, unnecessary reason. And compounding that are all the emotional beats to get Liam and Josie to their final resolution. Alex Roe and Jessica Rothe are perfectly lovely and winning. We can be happy to see them end up together, but it’s hard not to feel cheated to see some crappy behavior go unrectified.

Ultimately I am left puzzling over why in the first place Liam left the things that seem to make him happiest. His inner conflict is never presented as a fight between the glories of fame versus the comfort and responsibility of family. Nor is it even a matter of professional ambition versus personal happiness. Just about everyone in his life is totally supportive of him. Even his publicity team and handlers are good friends for the most part, advising him to take all the time he needs to mourn, despite being on the hook for lost tour revenue. So why then does he struggle to commit to Josie when it is clear she makes him fulfilled? The best guess I can come up with is that he must be suffering from anxiety, or some pathological fear or distrust of happiness, or some other mental condition. If only the film had realized what a broken soul were at its center, then it could have been genuinely touching.

Forever My Girl is Recommended If You Like: The Nicholas Sparks Brand of Romance, Cloying country music

Grade: 1.5 out of 5 Hasty Reunions