Laapataa Ladies: Review

There’s nothing like a good callback, the sound of a screenplay clicking into place. You can hear it several times over the course of Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies. My favourite: when Deepak (Sparsh Shrivastava) is seeking the blessings of the family elders after bringing his new bride home, his aged grandfather shouts jaagte raho (stay alert) instead of jeete raho (blessings). There’s general laughter but the explanation only arrives an hour or so later: the phrase is stuck in his head after a lifetime of saying it as a watchman. And there's a capper—a late revelation sealed by a perfectly timed jaagte raho!

Deepak’s joy at his homecoming is cut short in dramatic fashion when his wife lifts her veil and turns out to be a woman named Pushpa (Pratibha Ranta) whom he’s never seen before. On the train home to the village, there was another newly married couple, both brides dressed identically in red saris and veils covering their faces. There’s a shuffling of places, a badly timed bathroom visit, and Deepak walks out with the wrong bride (she follows because her vision is comprised by the ghoonghat—the first of many comic jabs at the ‘modesty’ expected of young women). 

After talking it over with his panicked parents, Deepak heads to the police station to file a missing person report. The officer in charge, Shyam Manohar (Ravi Kishan, in a paan-chewing turn to rival Saeed Jaffrey in Chashme Buddoor), toys with them, mocking Deepak’s predicament and the unlikeliness of the swap. In another police station far away, Pushpa's thuggish husband files a report as well. Meanwhile, Phool (Nitanshi Goel), Deepak’s wife, is waiting at an unfamiliar railway station, with no money or idea how to contact him. 

As luck would have it, the nervous, fluttering bride is the one stranded, while the self-assured Pushpa barely seems fazed by the turn her life has taken. Both take steps towards emancipation. Phool finds work assisting gruff tea-seller Manju (Chhaya Kadam) on the platform. Pushpa’s plans are more elaborate—we see her eyeing the family safe and making mysterious trips to the market, watched from a distance by a fascinated, if confused, Manohar.

As the film progressed, I found myself more and more taken with the modest poetry and intricate weaving of Sneha Desai’s screenplay (from a story by Biplab Goswami, with additional dialogue by Divyanidhi Sharma). Very little is introduced that isn’t brought back with purpose. A female police officer menacingly cracks a betel nut as Manohar deadpans, “Sports quota”. Later, when he calls for her, he’s informed she’s gone to collect the daily egg and banana allotted to sports quota government servants. There are wonderful running gags. Phool can’t remember her husband’s village, but knows it’s the name of a flower; in a bid to jog her memory, her well-wishers keep rattling off floral species, leading Manju to remark, “Bhawra bana ke rakh diya hai sabko” (you’ve turned us all into bees). 

Laapata Ladies is jauntily paced—nudged along by Ram Sampath’s charming music—yet finds time to be curious about characters other than Deepak and the brides. When we’re introduced to Manohar, he’s seated across from a woman his age who’s singing for him. When she finishes, we realize it’s been to get her errant son off the hook. Over a few deft scenes, Pushpa manages to draw out Deepak’s absent elder brother’s shy wife and encourage her talent for sketching (like the subplot in Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, only watchable). Even the acidic Manju has a happy-looking kitten in her room and a running battle with a customer who just wants a little more chutney. The outside world, circa 2001, comes into view from time to time: posters for Kaho Naa Pyaar Hai and Dhadkan, newspaper reports about ‘fake’ brides, cricket on the radio (Harbhajan bowling to Ponting).             

Rao, directing her second film after 2010’s Dhobi Ghat (she's been producer on multiple projects in the interim), draws wonderful performances from a relatively unknown cast. Shrivastava conveys Deepak’s sweet infatuation and the determination underlying his hand-wringing; you can see why Phool believes he’ll eventually find her. Goel, with her girlish tones, is perfect as the wide-eyed Phool, Ranta maybe a touch too assured for this setting, even if Pushpa is clearly made for wider horizons. Kishan's boistrous turn reminded me of Claude Rains’ Captain Renault in Casablanca, another blithe, randy, corrupt cop who’s as surprised as anyone when he finds himself taking a moral stance. 

Laapata Ladies sacrifices a bit of subtlety towards the end with a series of statements about female agency. As a marker of progress, the final image is more eloquent: the reunited couple walking hand in hand down the road, her ghoonghat no longer obscuring her face. Beyond that, I have no desire to pick holes in a film this cohesive and winsome. Not all those who wander are lost, but it’s still worth celebrating Rao making her way back to directing. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Dune: Part Two: Review

There’s a moment in Dune: Part Two when Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) is having one of his visions. Until now they’ve portended things to come, but this time he sees the past. “I saw our bloodline, mother, written across time,” he tells Lady Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), as we're shown his vision of a flaxen-haired baby. Something about the surface the child is on—sleek, black, ropy—helped my brain leap to a revelation a second before the scene confirmed it.

It’s not a difficult jump to make. Denis Villeneuve’s design sense is so consistent and exacting you can see patterns of story in it. He gives the impression, like Kubrick, of a director obsessed with every inch of the screen. There are times when Dune: Part Two explodes into action, Greig Fraser’s camera hurtling about like a desert wind. But more often Villeneuve prefers a languid or static camera, which allows the viewer to take in the otherworldly beauty of his CGI imaginings. It’s a fascinating paradox: a director tasked with making the biggest sci-fi blockbusters, but who’d seemingly rather have viewers gaze at his frames like they’re paintings.

We left Paul at the end of Dune a king without a kingdom. The Fremen are still wary of him, except for Stilgar (Javier Barden), who believes he’s special, and Chani (Zendaya), who thinks he’s neat. With their help, Paul becomes a proper desert warrior, eventually riding Shai-Hulud, the giant sandworms that the Fremen worship and harness as transport and weapons. With each step, the belief that he may be Lisan al Gaib—a messiah of legend—gains force among the Fremen. Paul himself isn’t sold on the prophesies; he just wants revenge against the Harkonnen for killing his father and the rest of House Atreides. 

Then there’s Lady Jessica, whose steeliness from the first film has only hardened. She’s convinced her son is the Kwisatz Haderach, a superbeing awaited by the Bene Gesserit order. She coldly plays on the hopes of the Fremen, drinking potentially lethal water to become their Reverend Mother, then pushing the idea that Paul is indeed Lisan al Gaib. She’s also pregnant with a daughter—and holds conversations with the embryo (only a director as unrelentingly serious as Villeneuve could have done these scenes with a straight face).

Villeneuve stages stunning guerilla raids on Harkonnen spice harvesters, Fremen fighters moving like the ghosts through their native sands. So successful are these attacks that the vicious Rabban (Dave Bautista) in replaced as ruler of Arakkis by the even crazier Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler), who like all Harkonnen has a hairless marble-white body but—perhaps a mark of his advanced depravity—also a black cavern of a mouth. He’s psychotic, Lady Margot Fenring (an amused Léa Seydoux) reports back to her superiors. A bit rich, coming from the frankly unhinged sisterhood that is the Bene Gesserit. 

The visual invention of the first film—from the dragonfly-like thopters to the desert mice called Muad'Dib (which becomes Paul’s Fremen name)—is carried over and deepened in the sequel. There is outstanding work by the production design, art direction and costume teams, apart from the more spectacular contributions of VFX and Fraser’s photography. Sometimes the execution outstrips the underlying idea. Feyd-Rautha’s introductory fight is in black and white, as if to stress the binary nature of good and evil. 

Dune: Part Two, like the first one, borrows from the desert cultures, mostly Islamic, of Asia and Africa (fedayeen fighters become ‘Fedaykin’, and so on). Given the whiteness of the ‘great houses’ and the brownness and blackness of everyone else, this is a white savior narrative of galactic proportions—with the caveat that these saviors might turn out to be bad news (there will almost certainly be a third film). “Arrakis in Dune are not Iraqis in their homeland,” Hamid Dabashi wrote in an article after the first film. “They are figurative, metaphoric and metonymic. They are a mere synecdoche for a literary historiography of American Orientalism. They are tropes—mockups that are there for the white narrator to tell his triumphant story.” The Fremen in Part 2 are easily led, superstitious, always chanting and offering prayers—the stereotype of the middle-eastern ‘native’ in American films. The contempt Hollywood usually has for such characters is suspended in favour of appropriation, though even these characteristics are only adopted insofar as they’re useful, like the markings on Lady Jessica’s face. 

Butler’s nasty Feyd-Rautha is more seductive than he should be. It’s Ferguson who’s truly scary, though, the mother taken over by the zealot single-handedly creating a prophet. Everyone else is subsumed by Hans Zimmer’s deafening music and the enormity of the designs. Villeneuve and co-writer Jon Spaihts are so deep in Frank Herbert’s world they can’t come up with regular dialogue—it’s just Muad'Dib and Lisan al Gaib and Kwisatz Haderach over and over. Dune: Part Two is a monumental barrage of sound and image. It does everything but make the heart leap.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Pressure drop: ‘The Harder They Come’

Watching Bob Marley: One Love last week, I was distracted by a stray mention of Jimmy Cliff. Already exasperated with its cautiousness, I spent the rest of the biopic intermittently dreaming of The Harder They Come. Same era, same sounds, same politics, and yet this 1972 film starring Cliff is as rough and exciting as One Love is polished and inert.

By 1972, Cliff was already a hit artist, with a handful of reggae standards—'Many Rivers To Cross', the protest number ‘Vietnam’—to his name. Filmmaker Perry Henzell approached him with a script inspired by a gangster named Rhygin, who was a local sensation when Cliff was a schoolboy. They hit it off, and decided to work together. Their central character, Ivanhoe, was changed to a musician who takes up the gun. They had a certain type in mind—“an anti-hero in the way that Hollywood turns its bad guys into heroes,” Cliff recalled.

The Harder They Come opens with a near-bus collision, albeit a comic one. It’s a fitting start, for this is a film of constant disagreements and challenges and clashes. The Kingston we see is an endless series of shanty towns, where corrupt cops receive cutbacks from marijuana traders and all but a select few live in grinding poverty. Into this comes Ivan, a young man from the country. He’s a singer with no money or belongings, a hair-trigger temper and a taste for expensive toys.

Ivan manages to cut a record with a producer named Hilton (Bob Charlton), but is disgusted with the pittance he’s offered. He goes to jail after slashing a man with a knife, is humiliatingly flogged as punishment. He becomes a runner for ganja traders—even here he’s dissatisfied with his cut. Once he gets hold of a gun, you know it’s just a matter of time before he’s an outlaw. Ironically, as he gets deeper and deeper in trouble, his song becomes a sensation across the island.

There’s a clue to the kind of film Henzell is making in the early scene where the streetwise José takes Ivan, newly arrived in town, to the pictures. Sergio Corbucci’s Django is playing, the audience delighting in the bloody action. “The hero can’t die till the last reel,” José admonishes one of them. Though it isn’t as pitiless, The Harder They Come has some of the down-and-dirty spirit of a Corbucci western. The hero isn’t a moral man, or even particularly likeable, there’s barely any rule of law, and everyone’s desperate (“a hungry mob is an angry mob,” Bob Marley would sing a few years later). It’s also likely Henzell had his eye on the first rumblings of Blaxploitation in the US. Ivan’s taste for cars, nice clothes, women and guns is more in line with Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft, both released in 1971, than the western outlaws he models himself on.

For all its debts to the gangster film and the western, The Harder They Come is at heart a musical. The soundtrack is blessedly Marley-free. You have ‘Pressure Drop’ by The Maytals, a track so electrifying it’s used several times in the film. There’s ‘007 (Shanty Town)’ by Desmond Dekker, who had one of the first reggae hits, in 1968, with the haunting Israelites. There’s Cliff’s previous hits ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’ and ‘Many Rivers To Cross’, and he sings the title track too. The deepest cut, though, might be Scotty’s ‘Draw Your Brakes’, a dub version of a 1967 rocksteady track. It’s cavernous, atmospheric, druggy and irresistible.

Reggae is mostly characterised as good-time music, but as Lester Bangs wrote in a 1976 piece, this belies the underlying violence. “Many of these records may be little more than a rhythm with a guitar chopping out two or three chords, no solos except a guy hollering things you can barely understand over the whole thing; but that rhythm is rock steady, the guitars chop to kill, and the singer is, often as not, describing class oppression or street war.” Keep this in mind and you’ll find Dekker singing “dem a loot, dem a shoot, dem a wail” or even something as simple as Toots Hibbert accusingly going “It is youuuuuuu” assume a great urgency.

The Harder They Come isn’t a smooth film, but it doesn’t matter because it’s exhilarating. Henzell has an eye for striking images and the quicksilver editing feeds on the chaotic energy of the lead character. It’s on a short list of films—Black Orpheus and Buena Vista Social Club are two others—that introduced the world to an entire musical culture. While this is a wholly deserved reputation, it tends to underrate the effectiveness of the film itself. In moments like the ecstatic church scene with a few mischievous inserts of human desire, or the chase through the ghetto with a group of children cheering on a pistol-brandishing Ivan, The Harder They Come isn’t just a great reggae film but a great film, period.

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge. 

Poacher: Review

The two most passionate members of the anti-poaching team in Richie Mehta’s new series have bird calls as their ringtones. With Mala (Nimisha Sajayan), a bird sanctuary official in Kerala, at least, it might be policy—natural sounds so as not to disturb nature. Alan (Roshan Mathew), though, is a computer engineer who moonlights as a snake doctor in Delhi. Yet, soft trills emanate from his phone too. 

The poachers carry their families into the jungle. One of them insists on taking along a photograph of his mother. Another’s actions are guided by the thought of his wife and son at home. Their brutal leader has his daughter’s smiling face pasted on the butt of his gun.   

It’s details like these that make Poacher such an engrossing series. Of the major showrunners in India’s first wave of streaming, Mehta is the most modest in his approach. Delhi Crime, which he created and directed the first season of, was a new kind of Hindi procedural: patient, sober, with dozens of characters across cascading plot lines. Poacher is in the same vein, methodical, trusting of its audience, a triumph for casting director Mukesh Chhabra.

Neel Banerjee (Dibyendu Bhattacharya), an ex-RAW agent, is tasked with bringing a gang of ivory traders down after the death of 18 elephants comes to light. He pulls Mala out from the bird sanctuary; she brings in Alan. Babu (Ankith Madhav), a forest official, and tough, resourceful SHO Dina (Kani Kusruti) complete the core group, though others pitch in as the series slaloms from the forests of Kerala to the streets of Delhi, where a gallery owner named Poonam Verma (Sapna Sand) is suspected to be a major trader of ivory. 

The scope of the investigation is laid out in granular detail in the first half of the series. This is where it's useful to have a director who works hard to vary setting, tone and technique so all that plot goes down a little easier (the dance bar opening to one of the episodes of Scam 1992 is a great example). The first four episodes of Poacher are a series of strategy meetings followed by raids and interrogations followed by more meetings and raids. It’s done with care and skill, and the performances carry even the most exposition-heavy scenes, but I found myself wishing for a little variation. 

Happily, the show switches gears in the fifth episode with a funny, revealing passage. Alan, who’s kept his family in the dark about his involvement in a frankly dangerous investigation, is on his way to a wedding with his wife and son. He receives a typically brusque call from Mala telling him to drop everything and join a raid. Instead of risking another argument with his wife—whom he’s just made up with the previous episode—Alan sneaks out of the venue, bribes the driver, see the raid through to completion, and rushes back. A welcome spotlight on the sheepish charm of Mathew, and much more interesting than the stereotype of the crimefighter putting their family life and mental and physical health at risk for the job (as Mala and Neel do).

The next episode is even better, splitting into two timelines, one following the poachers on their hunt, the other the forest officials visiting the site some months later. They’re led there by Aruku (Sooraj Pops), whose confession kicks off the series. Pops is superb as the conflicted centre of both expeditions, a sympathetic character even before an unnecessary revelation about his son. So is Vinu Verghese, who has a single memorable scene as a gunsmith who coolly trades barbs with his dangerous clients. Mehta showed a knack for deft character sketches in Delhi Crime, and Poacher is full of them—a lazy SHO who snaps to attention with a phone call from his bosses; two supremely confident getaway drivers in Delhi; Neel’s superior, played by Denzil Smith, calmly dispensing uncomfortable truths, one being that “sustaining the market at low levels”—pruning tusks for a little ivory—might actually save elephant lives. 

All this deftness goes out of the window when the show is in Delhi. It’s mystifying, given Mehta’s familiarity with the city and his perceptive, if pitiless, portrayal of it in Delhi Crime. Everyone peppers their speech with random bhenchods. When a police captain complains about feminism ruining everything, the show is practically begging you to compare the backward north Indian and the enlightened Malayalis sitting across the table. Alan and Mala are called ameerjaat (rich kids) and told to order or get lost, something a Delhi waiter at a roadside dhaba would only say if they had a deathwish.  

The depth of the cast allows for pleasing matchups: the soft and harsh tones of Mathew and Bhattacharya meshing; Amal Rajdev’s menacing Morris stared down by the equally formidable Kani Kusruti. There isn’t a lazy turn in the entire series, but Poacher nevertheless benefits from the forcefulness of Nimisha Sajayan in the lead. Sajayan is unlike any other Indian actress I know, incapable of making overtures to the camera, always getting to the point. No matter the film or the part, there’s a fierceness to her playing, reflected in her flashing eyes. She rages at everyone in Poacher—colleagues, superiors, bystanders, strangers. But there’s no affect to her anger. She just doesn't have time for your bullshit. 

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

All India Rank: Review

Sabatini poster, take me home.

Of all the ‘90s ephemera in All India Rank, it’s a pinup of the Argentine tennis player that whisked me back most effortlessly to my teenage years. Like Vivek (Bodhisattva Sharma), the dreamy protagonist of Varun Grover’s film, I grew up in Lucknow. I mooned over Sabatini. I had the same Sachin poster on my wall. I wore out my cassette with the Rangeela soundtrack. The comparisons end there. I ran from mathematics and the sciences, while Vivek is an accomplished enough student that his father hopes he might get into IIT one day.

Vivek’s hopes… well, they’re a work in progress. He seems more diligent than brilliant, which, given the crazy competition at Kota—where he’s been enrolled by his father in one of the town’s coaching institutes—might not be enough. A number of his classmates are presumably spurred on by a burning desire to be accepted in one of the IITs. But Vivek doesn’t seem to share this dream. He’s in Kota because he doesn’t have the courage or the vocabulary to say no to his father, or to offer a coherent alternate life plan (and at that age, why would he?). He pines for home and only starts to open up when he becomes friends with fellow students Chandan (Neeraj), Rinku (Ayush Pandey) and Sarika (Samta Sudiksha).  

The film divides its time between Kota and Vivek's parents back home. His mother runs a PCO and worries about her only son; she’s played by Geeta Agarwal, who appeared in last year’s 12th Fail as a mother whose son has joined a coaching institute in another city. Vivek’s father, RK Singh (Shashi Bhushan), a timid government employee, has transferred all his dreams onto his son’s reluctant shoulders. His inability to stick up for himself sees him suspended from office after the Independence Day cake he orders turns up with an upside-down Tricolour (“Are you a man or a marble?” his wife asks him, a taunt so funny he can’t help but laugh). 

This is Grover’s first film as director; he’s also written the script and the lyrics to Mayukh-Mainak’s playful songs. The charming lo-fi animated opening titles reminded me of Katha (1983)—and you can feel the spirit of Sai Paranjpye in the film’s shifting friendships and comedy of everyday struggles. Though there’s too much at stake for Chandan, Rinku and Vivek to become like the slacker trio of Chashme Buddoor, a few more years of (relative) failure might get them there. All India Rank is a third-generation descendent of the slice-of-life films made by Paranjpye, Hrishikesh Mukherjee and Basu Chatterjee. But Grover innovates by introducing moments of surreal whimsy—like when it starts raining pencils and erasers, or the eccentric montage with a parable about Buddhist monks narrated by Sheeba Chadha’s cool professor and scored with a modified ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’. 

All India Rank’s nostalgia is distinguished by its specificity. Chandan replies enigmatically to a question about his duplicitous behaviour by saying he likes the Shah Rukh of Darr, not of Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa. Vivek and his buddies hanging out in their hostel room is soundtracked with Indian Ocean: not ‘Kandisa’ (too obvious) but ‘Village Damsel’. A young pervert uses the fake name ‘Shawn Michaels’—one of the great heels of that wrestling era. When RK Singh smokes one of his three illicit cigarettes of the year (he only gives in on national holidays), he takes them out of a Fargo Gas Mantles tin that probably dates back to the ‘60s. 

I found myself more taken by the Lucknow passages than the Kota ones. It helps that Agarwal and Bhushan are beautifully paired, conveying a real sense of two people who’ve spent decades together. Their chemistry isn’t matched by the relationships formed in Kota. The friendship of Vivek, Chandan and Rinku isn’t memorable enough for a third-act rift to have much emotional impact; Vivek and Sarika’s attraction, likewise, is too halting. Bodhisattva Sharma may be wide-eyed by design but is not yet the kind of presence that can hold a film together. Neither is there much new in the film’s depiction of the grueling entrance exam ecosystem. This might be down to timing. Higher education has been the focus of several films and shows in recent years, and a lot of these storylines feel like they’re played out. 

RK’s slow realization that he’s pushed his son too hard leads to a wonderful scene. Fumblingly, he offers a safety net, telling Vivek that life is vast and many-splendoured and bigger than IIT. It’s practically a summation of ‘Yeh Jeewan Hai’ from Piya Ka Ghar, which he sings in an earlier scene where he’s consoling his wife. “Calculus is the language of change,” the young quartet are told. Yet, it's the old guard feeling their way towards change that's at the heart of All India Rank.   

 This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

Bob Marley: One Love: Review

I wonder if Reinaldo Marcus Green, director of Bob Marley: One Love, knows his film has a perpetual sticker in the lower right corner of the screen in Indian theatres. This is a film about Rastafari, so someone’s always smoking ganja. And if someone’s smoking in a film that plays in India, there will be a statutory warning plastered on screen. Baffling censor interventions, terrible audiences, prohibitive pricing: India becomes a worse place to watch movies with each passing year. 

Green was probably hired off the back of his Venus and Serena Williams film, King Richard, which showed he could handle a big-ticket biopic. Yet, there were warning signs in that 2021 film that Green wasn’t ready—or able—to push the Hollywood biopic out of its comfort zone. We see this in One Love, which lacks even the surface-level toughness of King Richard. The Bob Marley we’re introduced to at the start is already a legend—the only suspense is whether he’ll ascend to the level of messiah. 

By the mid-70s, Marley is the king of reggae music and a mass hero in a country weighed down by poverty and violence. With the island gearing up for a divisive election, he announces a peace concert, but is sent reeling after gunmen try to kill him. Marley decamps to England with his entourage, where he plays football, basks in his celebrity, and searches for inspiration for a record that he hopes will change the face of music. 

We see the album take shape. Marley hears a bandmate playing the main theme to the Paul Newman film Exodus. The word, with its Biblical implications, strikes something in him, and he gathers the band. He starts singing. The percussionist taps on a conga, the guitarist lays down some bluesy licks. Lines arrive fully formed. Soon they have the first draft of a classic, and a title for the record: Exodus. It’s a wonderful scene—one of the few where Marley’s music is allowed to exist separate from his legend. 

There are musical connections to be made, but the film doesn’t seem interested. In one scene, Marley and his band watch, half-bemused, half-impressed, as The Clash belt out ‘White Riot’. Might their version of ‘Police and Thieves’, a cover of a Jamaican hit, have been a more thoughtful choice, pointing to the deep influence of reggae on the British music scene then? The film opts for the most boring spiritual crisis—a mild corruption of Marley’s soul, aided by music biz insiders, eventually nipped in the bud by his exasperated wife, Rita (Lashana Lynch). Every time Marley struggles or despairs, Green trots out the same uninspired dream sequence: Bob as a child in front of a burning field, a man on a horse looming nearby.

Kingsley Ben-Adir is a sweet, passive Marley. The British actor, who played Malcolm X in One Night in Miami and Barack Obama in The Comedy Rule, manages the thick, musical patois admirably (his grandparents were from Trinidad & Tobago; Lynch, also British, is of Jamaican descent). But I found his performance lacking motive force, whereas Lynch takes her scenes by the scruff of the neck. There’s one moment when he explodes into violence, and it seems forced because it’s at odds with everything we’ve seen before.

The film is shot by Robert Elswit (There Will Be Blood), co-written by Terence Winter (The Sopranos) and produced by Dede Gardner and Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment. All the right people, but the vibes are off. Every now and then, a woman’s voice hums meaningfully on the soundtrack, a painfully Hollywood choice. I was reminded of the last famous-person biopic I liked, Ridley Scott's Napoleon, which broke free of the tyranny of accents by not doing them at all. That film had interest in its subject but little reverence. It’s the other way around with One Love, which could stand to be less respectful, and less afraid to stir it up.  

This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.

The Holdovers: Review

“You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?” Paul Hunham accepts this without protest. The schoolteacher has just admitted to a long-standing ambition to finish a monograph he once started. Even fantasy can't expand this into a full book. 

How well this rebuke applies not just to Paul Hunham but to Paul Giamatti. The actor has a few achievers in his filmography (John Adams in the HBO miniseries) and a few cheerful helpers (his boxing coach in Cinderella Man). But it’s mostly been a long line of grumblers, self-flagellators and misanthropes, his career-making turn as the caustic oenophile in Sideways, his sad-sack portrayal of underground comics legend Harvey Pekar in American Splendor, the perennially trumped US Attorney in the TV series Billions. All those dreams denied, deferred, drained of their vitality—Giamatti, 56, is one of the most engrossing essayers of American failure.

Paul teaches history at Barton, an elite New England boarding school. Though he likes the subject, he has contempt for his pampered charges and his servile colleagues. The film opens in the run up to Christmas, 1970, with students readying to leave for the holidays. All except a group of five—the holdovers of the title—who, for various reasons, can’t be with their families that year. Paul, to his disgust, is tasked with watching over them, with the help of the school cook, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who’s recently lost her son in Vietnam. 

The most interesting of the holdovers is Angus Tully, whose mother has gone on vacation with her new husband. He’s a smart kid with a big mouth, clearly more evolved than the garden-variety rich brats that populate the school. Soon, he’s the only one left, the other students making a grateful exit by helicopter (Angus’ mom isn’t reachable, so he doesn’t have permission). As the disappointed Angus acts out, he clashes with the unbending professor. It culminates in a sequence where Angus, with little to lose, runs through the empty school building, followed by a wheezing Paul, who even here can’t shake his professorial turn of phrase (“You are careening towards detention”; “Do not cross the Rubicon”). 

Fun as it is to watch Sessa make Giamatti puff up with frustration, The Holdovers is after something more resonant. After Angus injures himself, a worried Paul takes him to the hospital to get patched up. They stop at a diner on the way back, where Angus—a magnet for trouble—runs afoul of two locals, one with a hook for a hand (he looks like Elliot Gould in M.A.S.H—the Korean war comedy released that year). Later, when Angus complains that Paul took their side, the teacher asks, rhetorically, if anyone he knows has had their limbs blown off in Vietnam. He says it gently, though, perhaps grateful that the boy bailed him out at the hospital by not contacting his family and getting him fired. 

Right from the first image—a vintage certification card—The Holdovers harks back to an older era of American film. Alexander Payne’s work has always contained traces of New Hollywood, but the '70s setting makes the lineage clearer. Hal Ashby in particular informs the unsentimental comic tone; Cat Stevens on the soundtrack is likely Payne’s nod to the 1971 film Harold and Maude. It helps that Giamatti has an innate ability to seem at ease in any era, and newcomer Sessa somehow has an Altman face, a Warhol face and a Forman face.  

The Holdovers is an improvement on that other film about a troubled boy at an elite school helped by a crusty old man. Scent of a Woman has an inexplicable reputation as a classic and Al Pacino’s faintly ridiculous Oscar-winning performance. I was reminded of Pacino’s scornful ‘Baird man’ each time someone said ‘Barton man’ in The Holdovers. Payne’s film clears Martin Brest’s 1992 one easily: it’s funnier, better written and performed, and no one’s forcing out tears for a blind colonel. 

The film’s emotional anchor is Mary—though she herself might feel adrift in her sorrow. She doesn’t suffer fools, but even at her most exasperated she’s able to remember that Angus is a scared kid who deserves their sympathy (“Don’t fuck it up for the little asshole,” she scolds Paul). Randolph is a pleasure to watch as someone who’s barely keeping it together for herself (she drinks through much of the film), yet manages to keep the group together. 

Paul Hunham is the sort of role that comes the way of a lucky few actors after decades of hard work. It’s as if the wine obsessive from Sideways realized, like Noriko in Tokyo Story, that life is disappointing, and gave up raging. But Payne’s older too, and this time after acceptance there’s kindness and redemption. 

 This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.