The Holdovers

The Holdovers foregrounds three people in varying degrees of pain. It’s nothing radical — indeed, it’s consciously retro, set in 1970-71 and styled as though it were made then. The “film print” carries the spots and soft pops of age; the soundtrack is mellow and morose. Some folks will snuggle inside this movie like a blanket, because it’s ultimately comforting. Others may respond to it in a more prickly fashion, though it’s probably not meant to be held up to practical or political objections. Still, this is an atypically compassionate film from the previously cool and cynical Alexander Payne (Sideways, Nebraska), it’s gorgeous to look at, and it works if you don’t think about it too much.

Payne reunites with Sideways star Paul Giamatti, who specializes in finding the relatable or entertaining qualities in dissatisfied, dyspeptic men. Here, the script by David Hemingson serves Giamatti the role of Paul Hunham on a platter. Hunham teaches classical history at Barton, a New England boarding school. Various physical quirks have given him an eye condition and an illness that makes him smell like fish. Hunham is written as a strict and derisive martinet who slowly thaws in the company of others. The role is entirely in Giamatti’s wheelhouse, and it never requires him to take any chances. An Oscar nomination, and perhaps a win, has been signed, sealed, and delivered to him. Not that he doesn’t deserve it.

Hunham is obligated to stay at Barton over the Christmas break and supervise five students who can’t go home for whatever reason. Soon the group of kids is reduced to one, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a smart kid more or less throwing himself away because of trauma involving his parents. Completing the trio here is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph),  who runs the school cafeteria and whose son, a Barton grad, recently died in Vietnam. Mary is a Black woman surrounded by white guys who come from money and think they have problems. The white kids go off to college; the Black kids get shipped off to kill and die. The movie makes its points about this subtly, which is to say inoffensively, non-stridently. Payne wants to compare and contrast pain divided by race or generation.

The director gets quietly affecting performances out of everyone (Randolph’s Oscar buzz, also deserved, is even louder than Giamatti’s), even newcomer Sessa. I wish I trusted Payne’s good faith enough to view certain details more charitably, such as the school staffer (Carrie Preston) who brings Hunham Christmas cookies and has lipstick on her teeth — why? Why score a mean laugh off this kind woman who later invites everyone to her Christmas party? (This character also suffers from one of the script’s more pointless curveballs.) But the story’s inherent sentimentality must have touched Payne somehow, even on a nostalgic level, because this kind of joke eventually fades out of the movie and a sort of warm curiosity takes over. Ultimately it’s about Hunham redefining what he means by “Barton men.” Nostalgia, and wanting things always to stay the same, are a comforting but smothering blanket that must be cast off.

Misgivings about Payne aside, he has put together a tonally satisfying fable in which people watch each other carefully and wait for them to reveal hidden layers. All three main figures start out wanting to be left alone in their misery, like emotional Scrooges, but learn to reach out to others, to be part of something larger, a community. Or just to leave the womblike solace of the known — to be born. Here and there The Holdovers irritated me, but overall its high-toned gloom won me over. The movie feels as though it were fighting for the right to end the way it does. Payne leaves smart-ass caricature behind, and the characters earn dignity and respect.

Albert Brooks: Defending My Life

There are days when Albert Brooks’ Lost in America strikes me as the greatest American comedy film. It certainly has the funniest scene I’ve ever seen — the one where Brooks, playing a yuppie who’s dropped out of society with his wife Julie Hagerty, is trying to convince casino manager Garry Marshall to give back the nest egg Hagerty has lost at the table. Brooks’ character brings in every marketing strategy he knows — “The Desert Inn has heart” is the jingle he comes up with off the cuff — and Garry Marshall, in the brief, great performance that redeems every crappy rom-com he ever directed, can’t quite believe what he’s hearing. 

That movie is essentially made out of two-hander scenes — Brooks talking at various people, trying to impose his will. Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, the new MAX documentary directed by Brooks’ longtime friend Rob Reiner, is also largely a two-hander — Brooks and Reiner sitting in a restaurant chewing over Brooks’ career. (When they’re not talking, Reiner interviews other luminaries like Steven Spielberg, Judd Apatow, Larry David, Sarah Silverman, and many more.) Here, Brooks is in a more reflective (though no less funny) mode. Reiner nudges him to talk about this or that — Brooks’ father Harry Einstein, or “Parkyakarkus”; his early variety-show appearances, leading to Carson, SNL, and his sporadic gigs as a film director, spanning 26 years and only seven films. But, Brooks fans will tell you, they were the right seven films.

Reiner and his crew have dug up lots of vintage clips of Brooks plying his trade of meta-comedy — ironic comedy that went for laughs based on the staleness of the comedy tropes on display. In that respect, Brooks shared conceptual DNA with some other comedy stars waiting to pop, like Steve Martin or David Letterman or Andy Kaufman. Everyone in this movie, young and old, considers Brooks the cream of the crop, the ultimate comedians’ comedian. Brooks played with the toys of stage comedy, broke them, and got laughs anyway because he understood how they were supposed to work. Doing a bit about an inept ventriloquist, he could be funnier than a slickly done ventriloquist act could ever be.

We get a glimpse of the titanic Brooks/Marshall bout, though I would’ve been just as happy if Reiner had let it run in full. 1991’s Defending Your Life has its fans, though I was a cynic barely into my twenties when it came out, and it impressed me as sentimental in a way that betrayed Brooks’ astringent prior films. But the clips shown here reveal Brooks trying to make an honest-to-Pete old-fashioned Hollywood crowd-pleaser, no shell of protective irony this time, complete with happy ending and the music rising. It probably warrants another look. I was happy to see Brooks’ overlooked The Muse well-represented, with its surefire cameos. (Which I shouldn’t spoil; I recommend you check out The Muse before watching this documentary, so the cameos stay fresh. Trust me, it’s good, with maybe my favorite Sharon Stone performance.) 

The documentary is less a movie than a spin-off of Reiner’s and Brooks’ friendship, though it’s a more simply pleasurable and successful entertainment than anything Reiner has directed in too many years. Reiner does a decent job of establishing why Brooks became what he did, a titan held in equal awe by Carson and Kubrick. Like Reiner, Brooks literally had comedy in his DNA. Unlike Reiner, Brooks lost his father fairly young, and maybe there was an element of Brooks taking up his fallen father’s sword. That would be the superhero origin story. Brooks’ real story is more subtle, that of a young man who sought, consciously or otherwise, to understand his dad through comedy, and ended up understanding comedy better than anyone. Most of the true subject here, though, is not Brooks’ life but his mind. By the evidence here, it is, at 76, as acute as ever.

The Killer (2023)

If the director David Fincher had his druthers, the two-hour entirety of his new film The Killer — based on a French series of graphic novels by writer Alexis Nolent and artist Luc Jacamon — might be devoted to coverage of the assassin anti-hero (Michael Fassbender) assembling or disassembling his weapons, or using a gizmo he bought on Amazon to hack into someone’s house, or otherwise cementing the likeness between this killing machine and all his smaller machines. Ultimately, though, the Killer (as he is known in the credits) is a smaller machine supporting a bigger machine, however much he wants to see himself as an individual who only works for himself — no causes, no flags, no emotion.

That detachment eventually wore away at our engagement in the graphic novels, and the same thing happens in the movie. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (who wrote Fincher’s Se7en) apes comics writer Nolent’s affectless narration, which is long on hit-man do’s and don’ts. Almost everyone the Killer interacts with meets an early end, so after a while we don’t have any anxiety about those people; the only suspense is how he’ll dispose of the body or make it look like an accident. The only weakness the Killer has is his affection for his girlfriend Magdala (Sophie Charlotte), who was attacked to show the Killer he and his loved one can be gotten to. Why? Because the Killer, like so many fictional hit-men from Martin Blank to Ghost Dog, botches a job near the beginning of the film.

This trope is cobwebbed enough that we can guess Fincher intended The Killer as a riff on assassin literature. And in truth, this is probably Fincher’s sharpest job of direction since Zodiac. There’s a brutal hand-to-hand fight in which the Killer is pretty evenly matched with his foe, and the hits are varied and conducted with a merciless precision. The movie’s other similarities to the graphic novels are that it looks great and the violence has an abrupt anti-human vibe. Luc Jacamon’s rendering and especially coloring work on The Killer graphic novels are unassailable; Euro comics tend never to be half-assed and usually take pride in their craft (or maybe the half-assed ones don’t make it over to the States). Cinematographer Erik Messerschmidt, who won an Oscar for shooting Fincher’s Mank, works with a palette of muted blues and grays — it always seems to be raining even when it isn’t — that compels our eye rather than irritating it.

So okay: The Killer is washed-out and callowly nihilistic as a narrative (so much so that we can’t really believe in Magdala’s role as the redeemer of the Killer’s — and his world’s — sins) but tasty cinema. The presence of Tilda Swinton as a fellow assassin (called The Expert) to whom the Killer pays a visit put me in mind of Jim Jarmusch’s two runs at the hit-man theme, Ghost Dog (of course) and also The Limits of Control, where Swinton appears as a mysterious contact called The Blonde. Jarmusch’s films are dead-cool exercises that interrogate the very notion of assassin thrillers. Fincher is playing a different game — he works in the genre because it facilitates the bleak, mopey mood he’s after. 

Yet The Killer doesn’t leave me feeling like shit, the way his previous couple of films (Mank and the grotesque Gone Girl) did. I think it’s because The Killer’s mechanics of attack and retreat keep Fincher happily busy, and keep him from cruelly toying with our emotions too much. It doesn’t leave us feeling much of anything except respect for its aesthetic rigor. The graphic novels got far deeper into the geopolitics of the Killer’s livelihood, whereas the movie is much more simple, or simplistic. Certain bits of business stir or manipulate us as successfully as they always have. When we’ve got a Killer’s-eye view through a rifle scope and someone passes between us and the target, we don’t care if the target deserves to die or not — we just want to see the job carried off, and for that person to get out of the damn way. Thus does cinema implicate us in murder, as it has practically since its inception. The Killer is a drably familiar story that taps into the deeper ways we respond to movies. It doesn’t have a lot to say, by design, about what it shows us, but we can fill in the blanks if we care enough to.

Sly

Everyone who ever watched more than a few Sylvester Stallone movies will come away from the new Netflix documentary Sly with something different. Executive-produced by Stallone himself, it’s unavoidably sympathetic to the man’s life, work, and goals. Those who feel that Stallone was a corrosive influence on American culture and even politics, that his triumph-of-the-bum narrative dovetailed with the country’s pugnacious/sentimental view of itself in the Reagan era, won’t view Sly very warmly. Many of us, I think, harbor mixed feelings about this unlikely superstar and his naked desire, highlighted here, to make something of himself despite the disdain of his father.

As much as Stallone might like Sly, and his life, to mimic the poor-boy-goes-the-distance arc of so many of his movies, the truth is a little messier. Throughout the movie, we glimpse movers schlepping Stallone’s belongings into vans: he’s selling his Beverly Park mansion in L.A., where he’d hung his hat since 1998, and settling in Florida. (The mansion eventually sold to the singer Adele last year.) Stallone initially asked $110 million for the three-acre compound, but ended up letting it go for $58 million, about twice what he paid for it. The thing is, the place doesn’t look to us like a home. It looks chilly, untouched by human hands, as though Stallone were trying to get as far as possible from his humble roots in Hell’s Kitchen and then Maryland. 

That Stallone was comfortable enough in such a palace to live there for over twenty years says something. Stallone would like to advance a portrait of himself as an artist who made populist stories out of his own need to prove himself to his father. Sly links anecdotes from his life to his most enduring successes — Rocky, Rambo. Yet those who remember the ‘80s recall how those once-underdog characters metastasized into cartoonishly violent, and loudly “patriotic,” icons of the Reagan years. (Rocky took on Russia; Rambo refought Vietnam.) For a while, Stallone’s insecurities and anger meshed with the American self-image, and he was only too happy to make a fortune from it while also putting out truly despicable cold crap like 1986’s Cobra, which I’d love to hear him defend in the same aw-shucks terms he uses for Rocky Balboa. (To be fair, in recent years it’s gained a small cult who read it as a slasher movie with Stallone as a Dr. Sam Loomis who cuts his pizza with scissors.)

Time brought Stallone down a few pegs. As far as Sly is concerned, oh yeah, Stallone had a son, Sage, but he died, and that’s sad, on to the next. I imagine Stallone didn’t want to dwell on this too much, but the pain of losing a child is far deeper and sharper, and more permanent, than most any other kind of agony. Doesn’t the movie know that? Indeed, we don’t hear much at all about Stallone’s three wives, or his four other children. It seems the documentary has been whittled down to Stallone’s film successes, the early years of bitter struggle leading up to them, and the ongoing trauma about his father, who we see tearfully hugging Stallone on his deathbed. 

“I hate sad endings. Shoot me,” is the line Stallone leaves us with. At 77, he keeps on plugging. Just a couple of months ago he gifted us with The Expend4bles, the latest in a franchise everyone but stalwart action fans tends to forget exists. It opened at #2 and slouched out of theaters with a $50 million worldwide take against a cost of $100 million. Yikes. These days, Stallone’s resume is long on fizzles like that; his hits outside Rocky or Rambo are in the realm of supporting roles or voice acting, with a lot of direct-to-video or streaming fare. But Stallone hates sad endings, so we hear about none of that. Instead we get appreciative talking heads like Quentin Tarantino, critic Wesley Morris, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. There are no voices that challenge Stallone’s view of himself as the Hell’s Kitchen kid who didn’t quit. It’s the kind of amiable mythmaking that would’ve been right at home on a 1985 episode of Entertainment Tonight.