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(For Day 22 of NaPoWriMo, the prompt was for a fight between two unlikely combatants, like a good pair of metaphors perhaps.)

Age got into a fight with Youth,
For the hundredth time,
For the thousandth time.
What’s worthwhile, fun or truth?
For the millionth time,
But who knows?

Youth protested banal Age,
Was upset again,
Saying yet again
“You’re time-tested as a cage.”
Age said again,
“The cage grows.”

Youth and Age both craved command
For the hundredth time,
For the thousandth time,
But given time, they’ll understand.
For the millionth time,
So it goes.
___________________________

MPA rating:  R (mainly for language)

Alexander Payne is a much-lauded director, though I’ve only seen The Descendants and Nebraska from his filmography, both of which are good but nothing overly special in my view. I’ve heard that I ought to see Election and Sideways to really be impressed by his award-winning satiric wit, but I’m plenty impressed by The Holdovers. Oppenheimer may be the more spectacular Oscar contender from last year, but The Holdovers provided the relatable charm of an indie and a trio of pitch-perfect performances.

In one of his most tailor-made roles, Paul Giamatti plays the stringent Paul Hunham, the classics teacher at Barton Academy, where he is expected to babysit the few unlucky boys who cannot return to their families during the Christmas break of 1970. In the same boat is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the campus cook who recently lost her son in the Vietnam War. None of the students are happy to be stranded at their snowy school, least of all disgruntled punk Angus Tully (newcomer Dominic Sessa). Nevertheless, the three misfits make the most of their outcast holiday.

I can’t begrudge Cillian Murphy his well-deserved Best Actor win for playing Oppenheimer, but there is a part of me that really wishes Giamatti could have won that award. His character’s idiosyncrasies border on caricature, yet he always manages to make Mr. Hunham feel real, like a scholarly but flawed mentor remembered years later, as is likely the case since screenwriter David Hemingson drew inspiration from his own uncle and prep school experiences. Sessa does fine work with his bitter schoolboy, while Randolph (rising above any of my expectations after seeing her in Only Murders in the Building) is the most quietly tortured of them all (despite less development), well deserving her Best Supporting Actress win.

All three main characters are damaged, the layers of their grief gradually peeled back for us to see, and the ways they manage to support each other amid snipes and gripes make for both entertaining and empathetic viewing. With a brilliantly trenchant script and feeling like it was displaced from the ‘70s, The Holdovers is an instant Christmas classic.

Best line: (Paul Hunham, in a museum) “There’s nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man’s every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.”

Rank:  List-Worthy

© 2024 S.G. Liput
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