"The Holdovers"

    ☆☆☆☆½ 

Don't be fooled, The Holdovers is not here to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It doesn't exist to take a misanthrope and make him a happy, well-adjusted member of society, nor to show how an irascible taskmaster of a teacher, hated by his students, becomes a source of joy and inspiration. The Holdovers is not that simple.

Though it comes from the director of The Descendants, which, year after year, rises even further in my estimation and has become, I think, one of the really important movies of my life, The Holdovers is not The Descendants in a boarding school. It is its own complicated thing that refuses, even as it fades to black, to be easily defined. Yes, it's funny—at times it's very funny—but it could hardly be defined as a comedy. Yes, it's emotionally fraught—at times, very much so—but it could hardly be defined as a heavy drama.

Even before The Holdovers begins, it signals its intentions as director Alexander Payne opens with an old blue-and-white notice from the Motion Picture Association of America that the following feature has been rated R. This sort of thing vanished from movies in the early 1980s, but was prevalent in the early 1970s, when The Holdovers takes place; even if you're not familiar with it, you sense it's something different. The opening shots of the film have some scratches and grain added, and those who remember movies before the days of digital projection will recognize what Payne is signaling here: This movie is a throwback to a different time, and a different sensibility. What of those who don't understand the in-joke? Maybe it doesn't make much difference, or maybe the important thing is that The Holdovers is rather explicitly made for those who will.

But those who don't care about such things will still find something wonderful in The Holdovers, a movie that sets up its story quickly—only to reveal that what we think it's about is not at all what it's going to be about. To begin, it seems The Holdovers will tell how one curmudgeonly old teacher of history (he prefers "ancient civilization") at a tony New England boarding school, will need to care for five young boys between Christmas and New Year's Eve 1970. Except midway through telling that story, four of the boys are whisked away, leaving just the teacher (Paul Giamatti), one student (impressive newcomer Dominic Sessa), and the cafeteria manager (Da'Vine Joy Randolph).

Each of them, we come to learn, is living with the sort of deep, anguished pain that will never go away. Mary, the cafeteria manager, is struggling to make it through each day without her husband and her son, both of whom died terrible, awful deaths. Angus, the student, has been abandoned by his mother and her new husband—and harbors another secret that is revealed as the story progresses. And Paul, the teacher, is afflicted both with physical ailments that render him unattractive and undesirable, and with a deeper, harder betrayal from which he'll probably never fully recover.

It sounds trite to say that over the course of the two weeks that the teacher, the cafeteria manager and the student have to live with each other, they'll discover other truths about themselves and each other, but that is indeed what happens in The Holdovers, though it doesn't begin to suggest the way the film juggles emotional depth with comedic observation—and at least one painfully funny physical moment—without ever feeling maudlin or contrived.

The Holdovers does not try for the easy laugh or the easy cry. No one develops a fatal illness or plunges to their death or uncovers some dark conspiracy. The film is about how these people relate to each other, how they come to know each other and share the one thing that really matters: time.

Whether The Holdovers can catch hold in a moviegoing environment that favors big, bold statements as opposed to small, carefully observed ones remains to be seen. In another era, The Holdovers would be a big hit with both critics and audiences, would be the kind of movie we still talk about 30, 40, 50 years later. In that, it does seem like, well, a holdover from some other time—and that's what makes it feel all the more special.

Viewed October 28, 2023 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Leave the World Behind"

     ☆☆☆☆ 

A late-summer weekend getaway to Long Island becomes a nightmare of existentialist dread in the film adaptation of Leave the World Behind, a sometimes dazzling, sometimes frustrating film that largely eschews politics for tension, despite the presence of Barack and Michelle Obama as executive producers.

It's based on an equally dazzling, equally frustrating novel by Rumaan Alam, which by alarming coincidence was released during the height of the COVID pandemic, when even the most calm and rational of people couldn't help but be sucked in to conspiracy theories, ideological warfare, and often-justified paranoia. Three years removed from the darkest of those days, it's easy to forget just how hopeless, anxious and distraught the world felt, but no matter—Leave the World Behind is here to help those feelings zoom right back into the front of your mind.

Both the novel and the film are the story of a well-off White family from Brooklyn—mother, father, teenage son and daughter—who rent a lavish house on Long Island for a much-needed getaway. Just after they arrive, mysterious things begin to happen, not the least of which is a massive oil tanker running aground on a relaxing beach. Then comes a knock at the door in the middle of the night, heralding the arrival of a Black man who, accompanied by his daughter, claims to be the home's owner.

Initial tensions give way to a growing sense of uneasiness as the world seems to start collapsing around them, and part of the enjoyment of the film—if that's quite the right word, since it's disquieting and intense—comes from never quite knowing exactly what's going to happen next, or why, so there will be no major spoilers here.

The husband and wife, Clay and Amanda, are played by Ethan Hawke and Julia Roberts, who is given the thankless task of reciting some of the most stilted expository dialogue in recent memory during the film's awkward opening scenes. Leave the World Behind does not get off to a great start, though an endlessly roving, twisting, careening camera (courtesy of cinematography Tod Campbell and a laundry list of visual effects companies) helps to disorient viewers and serve notice that the film never intends to find a center of balance. It's a queasy movie, both because of that ever-moving camera and because of the uncertainty of the story.

Mahershala Ali plays G.H., the wealthy homeowner, who seems to be harboring a fair number of secrets when he shows up to the house with his daughter Ruth (Myha'la), but the screenplay by director Sam Esmail copies the same core problem of the book by introducing tensions of both race and class and then never following through. Incomprehensibly, the movie changes Ruth from G.H.'s wife to his daughter, undermining the tension between two married couples that permeates the often florid prose of the book.

Yet, as things get stranger and stranger, and the world goes off the rails as its consumed by some horrendous conflict, Leave the World Behind offers some top-notch filmmaking, including a central sequence that serves as its own master class in parallel cutting as each of the main characters discovers a small, puzzling, disquieting piece of the overall puzzle.

In tiny little snippets, the characters begin to work out some—but not even close to enough—of what's happening. All along, the movie stays sharply focused on the six people in the house, with only small and supremely uncomfortable moments in which they manage to encounter others. For the most part, though, these characters face the dawning realization that they are soon to be all they have.

By design, very little is given an explanation, though the filmmakers aren't quite as bold as the novelist, and in the end succumb to spelling out the backstory perhaps a bit too pointedly. If the film is largely designed to confuse, disorient and disturb its audience, it ultimately can't resist the temptation to provide concrete details about the central events. Still other key moments, like the sudden appearance of hundreds of deer or the delightfully weird moment in which self-driving cars pile up on the road, are allowed to remain mysterious, and they're better for it.

Leave the World Behind may feel too obtuse to some viewers, too languid for others, and maybe even too on-the-nose disturbing for a few. Stick with it, though (ideally in a movie theater; it plays on the big screen for a few weeks before its debut on a certain major streaming service), and it and its disturbing strangeness will probably stick with you.

Viewed October 25, 2023 — TCL Chinese Theater

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"Killers of the Flower Moon"

   ☆☆☆ 

David Grann's meticulous, riveting book Killers of the Flower Moon is not, in itself, an angry or vengeful piece of writing, but the feelings it evokes in a reader are ones of anger and vengeance. Reading it is a harrowing experience, one that opens the vein of the past to find the blood inside has been poisoned with racism, bigotry, intolerance and hate, all cloaked by the veil of the American flag. The story it tells is both largely unknown and genuinely unforgettable.

Now, Martin Scorsese has made a $200-million dramatic adaptation of Killers of the Flower Moon, and it is a grand and thudding disappointment, dramatically wrong-headed, apparently lacking in any self-awareness that the story it tells is not at all the story that matters.

The story told in the book is an epic, sweeping one, spanning many decades, beginning with the U.S.-sanctioned ethnic cleansing and forced diaspora of millions of native Americans, commonly called the "Trail of Tears," and leading to a series of shocking murders (and they truly are shocking), many of which involve family members of a woman named Molly Burkhart.

Molly and her family are Osage "Indians," native Americans who were herded to a rocky, ugly part of the Oklahoma prairie, where the American government figured they would lead hardscrabble lives, if they led any lives at all. Someone forgot to check the ground, because it turns out that Osage land was some of the richest in oil anywhere in the United States. Within years, the Osage people became the richest Americans, and some of the richest people anywhere in the world. Then they began to die.

Molly Burkhart's sister was one of the first recognized murders. Her story is one of pain and anguish, as Molly watches the destruction of her land, her home, her community, her people, her family, and ultimately her marriage and, almost, herself.

There's a key plot point in the book that normally would be considered a spoiler, if the film's trailer didn't give it away so clearly: the perpetrators of some of these horrific murders are Molly's seemingly loving husband and his uncle, a pillar of the community and supporter of Osage rights. Except he's not. He's doing it all for the money.

And this is what the movie version of Killers of the Flower Moon gets so wildly wrong: It turns a story about one person, one family, one community, and one people who are degraded and devalued and dehumanized every single day, and who fight so hard to have these murders solved, and turns it into a Martin Scorsese gangster melodrama.

The most brutally inhuman people in the story, William Hale (Robert De Niro) and Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), Molly's husband, are made into its stars. A roster of white men cycle in and out of Killers of the Flower Moon, some of them dastardly villains, some noble heroes, and by and large this is their movie, this is their story. That it takes place on Osage land is mostly not germane to the story. Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth, both of whom should know better than this, let the movie become a story about white men ratting out other white men. About one white law enforcement officer going toe-to-toe with white crooks.

Throughout, once in a while we get to see more of Molly herself (Lily Gladstone), mostly as she suffers in incoherent pain while her husband administers poisoned insulin to try to kill her.

The purpose of all these deaths is "head rights," the legal process that ensures the relatives of a dead Osage who owned rights to oil and mining deposits, would automatically pass them to the next of kin. To make sure head rights went to the "right kind" of people (that is, Whites), greedy, unscrupulous White men started marrying Osage women, then systematically poisoning them or arranging their deaths in myriad ways. They'd even kill the children, too, if that's what it took.

Grann's book details all this in astonishing clarity. Scorsese can never quite latch o to the story, because to do so requires the entire movie be told from the perspective of the Osage, particularly the Osage women, particularly one Osage woman—Molly Burkhart. That's not what the movie wants to give us.

I've rarely seen a movie so utterly unable to hone in on its story. Even at 3 hours, 26 minutes, Killers of the Flower Moon seems to have left too much on the cutting-room floor. Relationships aren't clear, consequences aren't clear, motives aren't clear. You can watch the film and get a good idea of what's happening, but it takes a little bit of effort.

The true story of what happened to the Osage—not just to the Burkhart family, not just to this small community, but to thousands, maybe even more, of Osage over the years—deserves to be told. Alas, Killers of the Flower Moon hasn't nailed it, despite the glowing, magnificent performance of Lily Gladstone as Molly, who should be the biggest star in the movie, but is third billed.

Killers of the Flower Moon isn't a bad movie. Elements of it are remarkable, particularly a jaw-dropping set design. Gladstone commands the screen every time she's on it, though De Niro still mugs too much, and Di Caprio seems slightly out of his depth here in a nuanced, complicated role. He's put in the unenviable position of having the audience knowing his terrible deeds, even as they watch him coming home and making love to Molly. He is the bad guy, but the movie wants to position him as the romantic lead. Hitchcock might have been able to get away with that; Scorsese and screenwriter Eric Roth are incapable. Grann conceals the truth about the nature of these men until midway through, but the film sets them up as the bad guys—Scorsese's beloved gangsters—from their first scene.

For a director whose first mainstream success was the female-focused Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, it's confounding that he struggles to put Molly—not Ernest and Hale—at the center of this story. Sure, DiCaprio is the bigger star, but Gladstone displays her character's soul, one wracked by terrible feelings of hatred, death, and loss. By all rights, she's the star of the film and Molly should be the star of the story (in this streamlined version, at least), and Killers of the Flower Moon would have been infinitely better if it had let her be exactly that.

As a finale, the movie has a group of elite white radio actors tell the rest of the story, segueing to a group of nameless, faceless Osage performing a ceremonial dance, Killers of the Flower Moon highlights exactly what it gets so disastrously wrong: showing the White people in close up, giving them names and personalities, while dismissing the Osage as anonymous pawns.

It's enough to get admirers of the book angry all over again.

Viewed Friday, Oct. 21 — AMC Universal 12

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"Dumb Money"

  ☆☆☆ 

Not all that long ago—just four years ago, by the calendar, or last year, if you don't count the two missing years of the pandemic—movies like Dumb Money were Hollywood's bread and butter: Cheap, easy, fun entertainment that could reasonably be expected to bring in an audience of adults looking for an absorbing diversion. The movies were full of Dumb Money.

Not so much anymore. Dumb Money is still a good movie. Maybe even slightly better than good, though not quite good enough to be great. It's got an incredible cast, all of whom deliver amusing, credible performances, and it's got some worthwhile observations about one of the weirder bits of recent history.

If you don't pay very much attention to the stock market, there's a good chance you missed the story that Dumb Money retells: How, in early 2021, when the world had tired of the pandemic and lots of people were still white-hot with anger over the ugly, tumultuous summer of the year before, a whole bunch of otherwise normal people got together and turned the tables on Wall Street. They did this by taking two stock that were considered such terrible businesses—GameStop and AMC Theatres—that big investors had actually bet against them. And like the spoiler who comes in, bets against the table in craps, and wins, they turned the game around.

There are a lot of really interesting, disturbing, uncomfortable things the GameStop fiasco revealed about Wall Street, the herd mentality of the Internet, the willingness of people to follow leaders they don't even know, the 21st century obsession with wealth. Dumb Money only bothers to look deeply at the first of these, because it views the people who caused the financial headache to be heroes. And maybe they are. Based on Dumb Money, there's really no way of knowing, because the script isn't very deep.

But it is fun. It's always fun to watch people stick it to The Man. It's always fun to see people beat the system. Fun With Dick and Jane is nearly 50 years old, but it's still a hoot—and it wasn't even a true story. This movie is about on par with that one, though I don't think it will take 50 years before people forget about it entirely.

It's fun to watch, it's inoffensive (unless you're easily offended by crude language), and it's well acted by a lot of excellent performers. It's also, curiously, a bit of a time capsule, as it takes place at a time when everyone was still wearing face masks, a moment this movie commemorates. And yet, Hollywood has killed this kind of movie, at least theatrically. Movies like Dumb Money exist now almost entirely to be tossed into the great Content Machine of streaming services. And that, despite Dumb Money's borderline mediocrity, is a shame. Had I watched this on streaming, I probably would have turned it off; it's simultaneously lightweight and convoluted, and attention spans being what they are, who wants that anymore? But in a theater, where the options are watch the movie or leave (or, sadly, and increasingly, turn on your phone and stare at it), Dumb Money effectively captures the attention, tells a good story, and in its own tiny way, reminds us what moviegoing is all about.

Or, used to be.

Viewed October 1, 2023 — AMC Topanga

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