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On not liking The Holdovers
I didn’t want to see The Holdovers because it looked like a troubled-young-man-comes-of-age story, a genre that bores me (there have been so many). I was persuaded to go by friends, found it was a sad-middle aged-weirdo-man-finds-himself story, and liked it even less.
Now, I think Paul Giamatti is a great actor, but was underwhelmed by the performance. I had no empathy for the character (and I am a veritable fount of fictional empathy), or indeed any of the characters. The manipulative sad teen boy, the saintly suffering middle aged bereaved mother for whom Da'Vine Joy Randolph won an Oscar, the various secondary characters.
I would have been more interested in the movie if it had held on longer to some of the secondary characters. The dynamic among the group of miserable outcast boys was a bit interesting and could have been rewarding, but off they went skiing, Carrie Preston I always enjoy, and the awkwardness of this creepy sad dude thinking she’s into him because she’s sociable and nice could have been fruitful.
The whole movie seemed set up to make me not care, as off-putting as the protagonist with his self-hatred and bad breath.
Personally found the Mary Lamb character made a lot of sense and was pretty sympathetic, not saintly exactly so much as lost. Because she was someone who had built her whole life around sacrificing for her son (working and LIVING at a school almost entirely full of pampered, entitled rich white boys/men would have been lonely as hell, her sister lived pretty far away and got the impression they rarely saw each other, she didn't have her own car, and didn't seem to really have real friends there), made him her world and her purpose, and then he died, senselessly, and all of those years devoted resolutely towards giving him opportunities to achieve his full potential were for what? And what now?
But agree with Amareldys, for the most part I experienced it as one of those comedies that detours into dark, painful places and enjoyed it, despite it very much being focused on a man and a boy veering towards becoming slightly less dysfunctional people. And isn't it funny how much something striking as comedy or not changes EVERYTHING about the experience?
I think Mary Lamb was very well performed but not very well written in that the movie isn’t that interested in her as a person, or even in her tragic story and her dead son. I felt that she and her grief were just a foil to the story were there for, of how a lost sad man and a lost sad boy helped each other grow up.
The thing is though, think there aren't many ways to write a character having that experience all that differently that wouldn't be a bit inauthentic; think realistically bereaved characters almost always need to rely heavily on acting rather than writing alone. That kind of grief walls people off and is all-consuming. There's a lot of silence in it, a lot of isolation, a lot of people not knowing what to say and so either not saying anything or constantly saying the 'wrong' thing (because there isn't really a right thing that will make it better, just a lot of things that will make it feel worse) that can make 'company' unbearable. For her, finally getting to the point of being able to let go symbolically, just a little bit, and finally deciding to reach out and reconnect to the world of the living in a meaningful way, to her family instead of the two male clowns of the story, letting some of that pain out, is a huge turning point and personally it worked for me as a character arc. And she was maybe a foil to a degree if you see the relationship between sad man and sad boy as the point, but alternatively she also was one corner of a trifecta in the theme, reconnecting to humanity from a place of feeling alienated, isolated, unwanted, forgotten, alone (with all three starting in that place of exile due to a combination of factors in and out of their control and all three eventually coming to a place of changing what they're able to change and in the process seeking and making meaningful connections with others).
What can I say. My feeling, watching the film, was that the elements were there, but didn’t add up. I understood that I was supposed to see the character this way, as I understood I was supposed to see all the characters a certain way, and I just didn’t. That it worked for you and didn’t work for me makes it better art than I thought.
Sounds like she should of been the protagonist of this story and who it revolved around. Powerful stuff, would have been more meaningful.
This is so interesting; I hadn’t heard of The Holdovers because I’m out of touch with culture atm, but I hated Sideways, which was apparently by the same screenwriter and also starred Paul Giamatti. It’s been a while but I definitely remember that I thought the characters in that film were deeply unlikeable, too.
Totally agree. I saw it because a lot of people raved about it, and I’m glad I didn’t go to the cinema because if I’d spent real money in this I would have been big mad. Some of my issues:
All in all it felt like yet another dad son movie where nobody has real regard for the women around him, but unlike the good movies of that genre they didn’t even get its main relationship right. It left me really cold and by the end of it, after their big transformative experience, everyone is just lonelier and sadder than at the start of the movie. Cool.
(Well, maybe the boys who went skiing had a good time, at least.)
did not feel earned, yes. That’s my main problem, I think.
That and the way the film treated the women characters.
Having lived through the 70s as a child, I didn’t feel the interactions were implausible, though admittedly I kept thinking of the 80s when I was tangentially acquainted with a boys’ private school of that type.
I thought the Randolph character was the only three dimensional woman character (and she did a lot with a little, considering she's like you say kind of a saintly mother stereotype). The mother is just a straight up selfish villain only interested in solutions that inflict max pain on her son, the friendly housekeeper is either lying when she says she doesn't treat everyone to cookies etc or she just likes the Giamatti character without having much reason to, and the waiter at the end is warm but still gets yelled at for not serving alcohol to a child... and I think that's all the women there are. Oh yeah, the freezing cold prostitute. Ugh
Okay, i don't remember that era haha, maybe I need to hear that and stop romanticizing the past!
I kept thinking of an 80s movie though, The Karate Kid, where the central dad/son relationship or mentor/mentee whatever feels like it really develops throughout the movie, you care about both, and there's mutual respect while there's no doubt who is the adult and who is the child. And at the end i cry lol
I enjoyed it. I thought it was hilarious.
FYI here is why I did not watch, nor watch anything by Payne: https://variety.com/2020/film/news/alexander-payne-rose-mcgowan-sexual-misconduct-allegations-1234759987/ https://www.thewrap.com/rose-mcgowan-alexander-payne-sexual-misconduct/
https://www.thewrap.com/rose-mcgowan-cancels-book-tour-spat-with-transgender-woman/ I believe, Rose, a Terf sister, who yelled this at a TiM who heckled her and demand she talk about TiMs instead of her life experience: `“What have you done for women?” McGowan said, raising her voice. After Dier left, McGowan launched into this:
“Don’t label me, sister. Don’t put your labels on me. Don’t you f–ing do that. Do not put your labels on me. I don’t come from your planet. Leave me alone. I do not subscribe to your rules. I do not subscribe to your language. You will not put labels on me or anybody. Step the f– back. What I do for the f–ing world and you should be f–ing grateful. Shut the f– up. Get off my back. What have you done? I know what I’ve done, God d—it.”
You can see more in the Instagram video post above.
Friday, The Daily Beast caught up with Dier, who said she felt sympathy for McGowan. “Her trauma was caused by men,” she said. “And I feel personally that maybe she has a traumatic response because she really does see us as men.”` --um, yeah, bc you are a man that harassed a SA victim. That's a man, bro.
PS it was also plagerized.
Dier, himself, is a sex pest of underage girls.
I had no idea. Thank you.