The Christmas leftovers
On film, there are private schools, and then there are private schools. Not every place depicted cinematically is Hogwarts, or the idyllic campus populated by Robin Williams’ Whitman-spouting teacher in Dead Poets Society. Some schools are just dead ends.
Alexander Payne serves up his own brand of Christmas movie in The Holdovers, one set in 1970 at an undistinguished private school called Barton, where a small group of entitled, almost-flunking upperclassmen dwindles even further as the holidays ensue. As these kids’ rich parents either hie their offspring off to ski vacations or St. Barts for the December break, one kid—Angus Tilly (Dominic Sessa)—is left behind, under the care of resident “babysitter” teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) and the school cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph).
A surrogate family, as it were, each with their own issues to work through. Hunham, a classics professor with a walleye condition that constantly keeps Angus guessing which eye to look at, is conned into staying over Christmas; but in truth, he has no pressing social engagements. He’s a tough grader, and the Barton kids hate him; he sees no reason to change that relationship. Angus is a smart kid with way more academic potential than his classmates, but his parents are split and the mother decides to leave on a Christmas honeymoon with his new stepfather, leaving him stranded at snowy Barton. And Mary lost a son, a Barton student who was called up to fight in the Vietnam War and never came back. Together, they make up a grieving non-support group.
Payne has tackled some tough, unflinching material before, from the moral lassitude of high school teacher Matthew Broderick in Election to the slippery slope of Jack Nicholson in About Schmidt. He’s kind of learned to find the humanity in his stories without sacrificing the oddball details that make his movies interesting. Like the way Hunham gives out identical copies of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations to both Angus and Mary as Christmas gifts (he apparently has a whole box of them). Giamatti finds a role he can sink his teeth—and roving eye—into here: he’s got the look of someone barely holding on by his fingernails to his job. Promotions and advancement seem to have slipped under the bridge for him; Barton’s a dead end he doesn’t mind hiding out in.
Angus (Sessa is very good here) has his own skeletons to battle, including a father who may or may not be dead. The only sensible turn for this story of stranded strangers is a road trip: all three hop in a car and head to nearby Boston for what Hunham calls an “academic field trip,” funded by the school. (This scenario calls to mind Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail, in which young court-martialed Navy private Randy Quaid is escorted through Boston’s snowy Red Light District by foul-mouthed Shore Patrol officer Jack Nicholson—one last fling before the kid is sent to the brig for 20 years.)
The Holdovers manages to illuminate these characters and reveal their grief without getting too sentimental. Hunham gets a chance to offer actual life advice—something more than just lessons from a dusty textbook—to a kid who has a future, if he can hold onto it. And Mary is just happy to find some comforting souls over the holidays. (There’s a bit of social commentary in that few Barton kids are black, except for Mary’s son, who had no strings to pull to stay out of Vietnam.)
It’s a reunion of sorts for Payne and Giamatti, having toured California’s vineyards to excess in the wry Sideways, now leaving the renewed Hunham to face his future away from Barton with a stolen bottle of Louis XIV cognac—which he spits out after the first sip, as though rejecting the fineries of a shelved life.
Speaking of misanthropes and lockdowns, Julia Roberts mostly jettisons her trademark winning smile for a frown in Sam Esmail’s Leave the World Behind (now on Netflix), playing Amanda Sanford, a dissatisfied advertising executive who decides to rent an Airbnb outside Manhattan and take her family to Long Island for a holiday.
Husband Clay (Ethan Hawke playing a slacker City College professor) and kids Rose and Archie hie off to a modern, spacious rental deep in the woods, but close enough to a beach, where they are shocked to see an oil tanker ramming itself onto shore.
Soon, most satellite links go kaput, the phones and GPS stop working and the Sanford family find themselves suddenly cut off from their precious digital connections.
Not only that, but their home is visited that night by a tuxedoed fund manager G.H. Scott (Mahershala Ali) and daughter Ruth (Myha’la), who announce that the Airbnb rental is actually their home, and that a blackout in the city has forced them to crash overnight. Amanda, hyperactively suspicious, goes into full “Karen” mode. She would demand to see the manager, if they had a WiFi connection. Racial tensions rise as Amanda and Clay have no way to verify the identities of the Scotts. Meanwhile, their kids take to wandering the perimeter of the property, where Ruth starts spotting congregations of deer that are just, like, staring at them eerily.
Sam Esmail has explored the territory of society collapsing before in Mr. Robot, of course. In that series, Rami Malek finds himself in the middle of a society-crashing group of hackers whose activities cause online fortunes to go poof. Here, the threat is grounded in the sudden struggles of two families who suddenly find their ability to navigate the world has gone poof. Clay is incapable of reading street signs without his GPS and can’t even make it to town to find out what’s really happening. Weird shrill noises cause people’s teeth to fall out. A daughter feels her life is incomplete unless she can watch the final episode of Friends. And flamingoes decide to fly north and plop down in the Scott’s swimming pool, à la The Sopranos.
This is apocalyptic stuff, and Leave the World Behind doesn’t have to answer all the questions; rather it relies on serving up tantalizing teasers (local survivalist Kevin Bacon thinks it could be the Koreans. Or the Chinese. Or maybe the Deep State US government behind all this topsy-turvy weirdness). It does suggest just how easily a society could be set adrift if its digital lifelines have all been suddenly severed.