“The Holdovers” feels like an apology, an admission on the part of its central architect of a willingness to behave. The 2017 film “Downsizing” was a swing and miss for director Alexander Payne, a massive experiment in satiric science fiction that collapsed into a muddle of pseudo-racist speechifying that would’ve made even Paul Haggis of “Crash” blush. It was a lumbering embarrassment that sullied Payne’s celebrated oeuvre, a collection of character-centric dramedies that includes the overrated “Election,” “About Schmidt,” and “Sideways” as well as the beautiful and scathing “Nebraska.”
By contrast, “The Holdovers” is soft, humble, and devoted to a coming-of-age formula, with scruffy 1970s-era cinematography and old fonts and period-centric detail that all but cry: “Movies, now more than ever! In this age of IP, let’s do it like we used to!” It marks the reunion of the director with his greatest leading man, Paul Giamatti of “Sideways,” and, above all, Payne’s scathing acidity – the loathing for everyday people that he used to mistake for empathy – is pointedly missing. The banishment of that sneer is a mixed blessing. This is a nice movie, but it doesn’t have a brash attitude to leaven the clichés. Think “Sideways Poet’s Society.”
Yet, I didn’t mind. In this era, one can’t take a competent pop movie for granted. Payne’s lost the vinegar, but his eye for texture and detail has returned. The film is set in a New England boarding school in 1970, the kind of place with kids who have senators for parents. The place has a rustic, lived-in vitality that’s virtually nonexistent in modern American cinema, with its movies that assert their period settings in all caps.
Paul Giamatti is, well, Paul Hunham, a brilliant misfit teacher of ancient history who takes pride in being the stumbling block on his students’ preordained path to success. Erudite, crusty, secretly a dashed and self-hating romantic, Paul is a role tailor-fit for Giamatti, and he makes a meal of it. If the film has little tension, as Paul is obviously going to learn to be a more open man, Giamatti ensures that liability barely matters. Giamatti’s admirers come to movies like this for his intimate expressiveness and peerless timing – for his everyman-as-movie-star poetry. He makes it look easy and for him it may be, and that ease is a large part of the film’s sense of pleasure.
It’s Christmas, and most of the rich boys are going off to ski at Gstaad. Oh wait, that was “Scent of a Woman.” Anyway, they’re going somewhere wonderful and forbidden to us mere financial normies, and Paul is eventually stuck on the campus babysitting Angus (Dominic Sessa), a gifted student who is also rich, but neglected by his parents. Also on the premises is a cook, shamelessly named Mary Lamb and played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph with a sense of warmth and torment that threatens to upstage even Giamatti’s absurdist “man of winter” routine. Mary is Black, everyone else is white, and Payne manages a balance that’s unusual in these self-conscious times: The differences in station and opportunity that separate Mary from Paul and Angus are observed without becoming a sanctimonious talking point.
Payne sets these characters up and basically lets them hang out. He doesn’t allow too much plot to get in the way, as he threatened to in “Sideways” and “The Descendants.” I could’ve lived without the explanation for Angus’ anxiety, which paves the way for the speech and sacrifice that must happen in the third acts of all these sorts of “Oh captain, my captain” movies. As always, I wish Payne trusted the power of individual episodes more. With its shaggy plotting and sharp lines and intimate décor and devotion to characters that look like actual human beings rather than stand-ups at a gym, “The Holdover” is going for a Hal Ashby vibe and gets closer than one could reasonably expect from a contemporary film. Contrary to legend, Ashby’s films were schematic too, but with rough, volatile textures no one noticed.
Payne is hip enough to know when to nip a scene that’s on the verge of getting too maudlin, but he pulls back from the volatility too. There’s a close-up of Mary at a Christmas party, as she mourns the son who died in Vietnam, which might rate as the finest and most moving single image in Payne’s career – it’s right up there with the finale of “Nebraska” and worth the price of admission alone. But Payne keeps tethering you back to that formula, which goes down easy but hems the movie in.
I loved “The Holdovers” while it was unspooling. It’s been a hard year and I needed this comfort food. It is Thanksgiving dinner with the trimmings made by skilled chefs who know to use stale bread for the dressing and bits of orange rind with the cranberry relish. I will almost certainly watch every year moving forward with my brother, who enjoys similar such movies. But after a while you may wonder, did I need to eat that much? For the self-conscious, comfort always comes with guilt. We can’t win. Payne’s confidence in formula and self-effacement arise, despite the limitations of the movie, as a kind of hard-won grace. He’s not a wise-ass here, but an entertainer unpretentiously putting on a show.
David Fincher’s “The Killer” is spikier than “The Holdovers.” Or is it? This film is riddled with the same irony, perhaps hypocrisy, as Fincher’s “Fight Club”: It is a chic, expensive designer item that holds chic, expensive, complacent designer culture in contempt. It is pre-fab rebellion fashioned by the master pre-fab rebel, and Fincher has never not known this about his work. Like Payne, he’s self-consciously selling you a formula cuz … why not? Formula is fun damn it, and can we cinephiles ever bring ourselves to admit that? Formulas are fun because they are ritualistic and dependable and often shallow. You pay for something and you get it.
“The Killer” is “Fight Club” at a chillier register. Thank God. You can rationalize that overheated movie into anything, but for me it took itself far too seriously. Both films are obsessed with branding, suggesting gothic IKEA commercials as hosted by self-hating ghouls who narrate their disenchantment to us. “Fight Club” had Edward Norton, while “The Killer” has Michael Fassbender as an assassin who opines about the “proteins” available at McDonald’s while utilizing WeWork for an office space across a Parisian street from an elitist who is to be killed while preparing for sex with his for-hire dominatrix. Everything here is for hire, everyone is disconnected and doing work for nameless masters for unknown reasons. High-end contract killers played by celebrities are contrasted with servers and cab drivers who’re paid by the hour and played by unknowns. Think Jarmusch’s “The Limits of Control” or recent Steven Soderbergh films, though with far more interest in entertainment value. “The Killer” is repulsed with, and intoxicated by, the apocalypse of gig culture, yet I don’t want to interpret it to death.
Because its pleasures lie elsewhere: “The Killer” is one of the most intoxicating films to see and hear that I’ve encountered this year. Fincher has a Kubrickian reputation as a task master who requires endless takes per scene, and it shows – wonderfully. Every shot is pristine and multi-layered, with one faultless composition flowing into another. This thing moves like buttah. I haven’t seen this many shades of nighttime in ages, and the opening 20 minutes are a master class in droll suspense and spatial clarity. Fincher’s toggling between apartment windows is the closest that any modern director has come to the unmooring, geographic hyper-coherence of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window.”
In the second half of the film is casually one of the best hand-to-hand combat scenes in American cinema. Like Michael Mann, Fincher is attuned not just to motion but to sound, and so the slicing of fists through the air is as cathartic and haunting as the connective tissue of the resulting violence. Fincher is always best when owning up to his superficiality. As in other high Fincher watermarks, style is substance here.
In other words, both of these accomplished films with formula ingredients ultimately find their highly skilled and highly aware directors strutting like Peacocks in a place of contented complacency, years removed from their 1990s-era heyday as provocateurs. They are comfortably numb yet conscious of it, shouting into the void from what are no doubt their lux homes and offices. If you’re young, you can judge them for making these movies and me for approving of them. But let me tell you: comfort can be underrated.
“The Holdovers” is now in theaters, while “The Killer” can be found on Netflix.
