2024 Oscar Nominees (pt. II)

The Holdovers

Poor Things

Greetings, my groovy go-getters, and happy Oscars eve-eve-eve! I hope that at least read enthusiastically because I assure you I was not overflowing with enthusiasm as I typed it. As I stated last week, I find the Oscars—and the surrounding discourse—to be insufferable at times. The last Oscars that really made me feel something were in 2020, just before the pandemic began, when Parasite defied the odds and won Best Picture. I’ve been chasing that high ever since but rarely am I satisfied by the way these awards are dispersed and discussed. I was pleasantly surprised by elements of last week’s Best Picture nominees, but as I continue to view the entire list of these nominees, I’ve begun to ponder what exactly qualifies a “Best Picture” contender in this day and age, especially when some of the most talked-about films and performances of last year were ruthlessly snubbed. But let me just take a deep breath and trudge on through these next Best Picture nominees, because these are likely the last of the selections I’ll endure—one of these days I might watch Maestro and The Zone of Interest but I am currently at my capacity for biopics and Holocaust dramas. (With all due respect to Leonard Bernstein’s ghost and my ancestors.) Let’s begin with one of the more unexpected nominees from this year’s clusterfuck of cinematic achievements: Alexander Payne’s film The Holdovers. I remember seeing the trailer for this film back in the summer of 2023, and thinking to myself: “Well that’ll be a cute movie to watch on a plane someday.” Then, the next thing I knew people were ranting and raving about this film, about Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s astounding performances, about how this new twink Dominic Sessa was coming for Timotheé Chalamet’s gig, and I was like “Oh okay! I guess I’ll see it now!” It’s always a bit disorienting to watch Christmas movies when Christmas has passed, but I was too curious about this underdog of a Best Picture nominee, and I’m always down to watch Paul Giamatti be his usual salt-of-the-earth self. The Holdovers, written by David Hemingson, begins in December 1970, at the idyllic but frigid setting of a New England all-boys boarding school called Barton Academy. There were no Holden Caulfields to be found at this school, no plucky Dead Poets Society or John Green characters, only a cast of rascally teenagers who are led by the lovingly lanky Dominic Sessa—who was a student at one of the schools where they shot The Holdovers (he was one of twelve young actors to audition and has never acted professionally, previously.) Paul Giamatti plays Paul Hunham: a classics professor at Barton Academy who is widely hated by his students for his strict policies. Paul has also managed to piss off the headmaster of this school—who was once Paul’s student—by flunking the son of one of this school’s wealthiest donors. He’s a teacher who values actual effort and passion and earning one’s way, but his punishment for rightfully failing this student is to be the designated chaperone for the five students who have nowhere to go for Christmas vacation. Angus Tully (Sessa) is one of Paul’s very few best students to earn above a C+, and has plans to see his family during Winter break, until his mother calls him at the last minute to inform him that instead he’ll have to stay at school while she goes on a honeymoon with her new husband. Also staying behind with Paul and his temporarily-orphaned students is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s cook, who is mourning the loss of her son who died in Vietnam and having to endure these spoiled brats on top of everything else. Defeated and desperate, this band of boys represents a spectrum of the crop of dudes who attend this fancy academy—from a young Mormon boy who’s parents are on a mission, to Tully’s sadistic, racist bully (who is shorter than Tully and still manages to kick his ass), to an exchange student from Korea, to a super cute skater bro who’s not allowed to come home until he cuts his long beautiful hair. As random as this rag-tag crew is, Tully is still the odd man out—seemingly having very few friends and interests that overlap with the other boys, and holding onto secrets like the fact that he’s already been kicked out of one school. At a certain point, every boy except Tully is rescued from their snowy isolation, and only Tully is left to undergo Paul’s cruel and boring tactics of passing the time. Mary tells Paul to go easy on these kids—which he eventually does—but Paul is such a square who rarely gets out, that he himself struggles to think of ways to put a smile on this lonely kid’s face. Though tired and uninspired and cranky, Paul’s icy exterior begins to melt around the calming and hopeful presence of Mary, and this trio eventually breaks out of their dull imprisonment and makes this school-sanctioned staycation much more of an adventure. I was immediately won over by this film’s heavy doses of nostalgia for a time in which I never experienced, and played all of the right music to make this chilly place and premise feel warm and fuzzy. So many elements and pieces of dialogue in The Holdovers felt authentically sour and sweet, which makes sense given that writer David Hemingson drew inspiration from some of his own childhood memories. And while I’ve never been a rich only child forced to stay at their boarding school during the bitter Winter, Tully’s loner status felt oddly resonant in a post/current-COVID world, when he said “You may be fine here reading books, but I’m losing my goddamn mind” I was immediately transported to those early days of COVID when there was nowhere to go, and when Winter came our power was out frequently (tysm shitty Texas power grid.) And it warmed my heart to watch Tully and Paul learn about one another’s similar idiosyncrasies, and begrudgingly learn that neither one of them are that weird or that different, after all. Overall the film was fine, serviceable, perfectly enjoyable. But in the last ten-ish minutes it managed to upset me and dampen a bit of that cozy feeling that the first 2 hours of the movie had enveloped me in. It doesn’t ruin the movie, it just seemed like an unnecessarily pessimistic conclusion for the overall tone and trajectory of the film’s hopeful-in-spite-of-everything premise. Paul Giamatti absolutely deserves an Oscar nom, not just for his effortlessly lovable curmudgeon performance in this movie but for consistently giving memorable performances in all of his movies. The script was well-written and sympathetic to most of its characters, offering comedic and poignant moments for each and every player. Da’Vine Joy Randolph is a standout, and she’s deserving and destined to win that Oscar, she’s already won every other best supporting actress award so far! I think Dominic Sessa did an absolutely incredible job and I’m not just saying that because he’s my type on paper (islanders iykyk) it was his first acting job ever and my research has not turned up any evidence of nepo baby-ism so I give kudos and kisses to him. So many aspects of this film were perfection—the serenely snowy setting, the fun soundtrack, Paul Giamatti’s colorful vocabulary, the cast, the characters and the transformations they undergo, the island-of-misfit-toys of it all—and while there were just a handful of anachronisms—as my mom pointed out—the aesthetic was pretty damn cozy. But god forbid you actually call this movie cozy, as director Alexander Payne resents that moniker… If you ask me, Alexander Payne should be less concerned with making cozy movies and more concerned with the predatory allegations made against him, but what do I know! I hate to make it seem as if I hated The Holdovers—because I didn’t—I just wish it had ended at the 2-hour mark, when all was well, and this critic who’s experienced a lot of stress lately could just enjoy a happy ending, but I digress. I now, unfortunately, have to discuss another Best Picture nominee that I also didn’t fully HATE, but really tested my definition of the word. I waited quite awhile to watch Yorgos Lanthimos’ latest film Poor Things, just as I have waited—and am still waiting—to watch Emma Stone in La La Land. Emma Stone is one of my favorite actresses of this generation. I still have a fierce and unwavering love for Easy A, The House Bunny, Superbad, Crazy Stupid Love, and The Amazing Spidermans with Andrew Garfield (fight me, spider-nerds), not just because they’re all fun movies but because Emma Stone especially stands out as an endearing, effortlessly funny and relatable presence—without which these films would never survive. When she started to drift into dramas and “prestige actress” territory, I cheered her on—and still do—but I feared that as she dabbled in other genres and archetypes that some of that endearing relatability would float away. I’d already braved through watching her in the haphazardly-made Cruella, so any other cringe felt very risky to my love of Emma Stone and to my health. One day I’ll see La La Land, I suppose (though Damien Chazelle is on thin ice with me) and I did genuinely enjoy her in Yorgos’ film The Favourite, even though Rachel Weisz and Olivia Colman could’ve acted circles around her she managed to keep up. I just hate seeing my favorite actors in movies that force them into a rigid, small circle of a role, that on the surface may seem impressive, but ultimately ends up being limiting. When I saw commercials for Poor Things, I was extremely put off. It wasn’t just the fact that The Lobster and The Favourite—two of Yorgos’ most beloved films—both insisted upon angering me by the end of their respective runtimes, it was the knowledge that I’d have to sit and watch Emma Stone spazzing out on the big screen in a potentially-less-endearing way—and for over two hours at that. So I waited, and I waited, and I didn’t buy a ticket to see it, I didn’t even pirate it, I waited until today—when it was finally on Hulu—to actually see for myself if this film was as off-putting as its marketing was. If you cannot already tell by my tone, dear reader, Poor Things was, more or less, just as off-putting to experience in its entirety as it was in its 2-minute long trailers. Poor Things takes us to Victorian London, and imagines Stone as Bella Baxter—a gender-bent Frankenstein’s monster who’s been brought back to life by Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe) a monstrous creature in his own right who stumbled upon Bella’s body just as she threw herself from a cliff. As it would turn out, when Bella committed suicide she was pregnant. So, being a mad scientist and all, Godwin removed the baby’s brain and put it into adult Bella’s body—thus creating a blank slate of a woman that he can study and experiment on and observe with wonder and delight. He enlists the help of Max (Ramy Youssef), a student of his, to record and study Bella’s developments, and how quickly her brain can catch up to her adult body. Bella can barely walk, talk, or form a thought, she babbles like a baby and does a voice that could be considered offensive (sorry but if Lupita got shit for her vocal choice in Us, then I can’t let this slide) but when she’s able to speak in a somewhat British accent, this is not much better. Godwin wishes for Max to marry Bella, and live under his roof with all of his other monstrosities—spliced animal creatures like a pig on a chicken’s body and a goose on a dog’s body—so he has his lawyer Duncan (Mark Ruffalo) to draw up a nuptial contract. At the same time, Bella is progressing quickly and discovering what she can do with her body—mostly masturbating I guess—and she seems less and less keen on the idea of staying in this big creepy mansion forever. Duncan the dumb lawyer sneaks around Godwin, though, and convinces Bella to run off with him on a sexcapade, to which she happily agrees. He takes her to Portugal and Alexandria and Paris by way of a large cruise-type ship, all the while feverishly humping each other with the vigor of two teenagers who have the house to themselves for ten minutes. Which, as gratuitous as this unsexy sex was, it still was nowhere near as unpleasant as a scene just before this, when Bella attempts to shove several different kinds of food items into her vagina, with some success. All through her adventures, Bella learns much about herself, the world, and the careless cruelty of men—especially her lover Duncan. To see the always-charming Mark Ruffalo play such a viscerally repulsive character was far more nauseating than this film’s at-times-bloody special effects, but he’s hardly the worst man that Bella comes into contact with. I applaud the idea of a character like Bella Baxter—one who seeks to explore female sexuality and agency through the lens of an unpracticed and naive woman who very quickly learns how powerful she can be, even in a world destroyed by the whims of men. The issue, as is the case with every other Yorgos movie I’ve seen, is that the tone of this film is all over the place, and its intentions are muddied, at best. I’m all for movies about women getting laid and frolicking around, but there are typically a bit more successful and distinctive—they’re either goofy sex comedies that can be sexy and silly, or they’re subversive psycho-sexual stories that turn the ideals of desire on their heads, and either way I am thoroughly entertained. And while Poor Things had a handful of funny moments, it didn’t exactly make me die of laughter, nor did it puzzle and perplex me with its approach to unsexy sex (after watching films like Pink Flamingos and Secretary, though, maybe I’m just spoiled with actually-transgressive cinema.) I do not tire of Emma Stone’s rise to prestige, nor do I knock anyone for celebrating the almost-decent narratives of Yorgos’ filmography, what I do tire of is the hype surrounding films that fail to meet the high expectations forcefully set by audiences that are clearly starved for bizarro films. Out of all of the Best Picture nominees, Poor Things has had the most hype, intrigue, and it would have the most accolades—were it not for Oppenheimer’s random winning-streak. As someone who has now seen eight of the ten Best Picture nominees, I struggle to understand why it has received such acclaim and such hype—but again, I may be coming from a privileged perspective because I’ve just seen so many authentically-disruptive and excitingly-weird movies. I think some of the best and worst parts of Poor Things are its aesthetic—it won me over with the gorgeous costume design and gargantuan steampunk landscape, but turned me off with its incessantly cacophonous score of violently-plucked stringed and overblown whistle tones that sounded a bit like my asthmatic breathing when I’m mid-allergy attack. I didn’t need to hear Mark Ruffalo call Emma Stone a “whore” or a “cunt”, I didn’t need to see Ramy Youssef play an insecure beta male that isn’t likable, I didn’t need to see one of my favorite nepo babies Margaret Qualley be so wasted, and I certainly didn’t need to see another movie about female agency told predominantly by men. None of my words of disappointment and annoyance could properly sum up what this movie could’ve been and what it wasn’t, but Angelica Jade Bastién’s review in Vulture really hits the nail on the head, several times, so allow me to quote her brilliant piece:

“What Poor Things aims to be is a fantasia of sherbet colors and steampunk steel, a Frankenstein-inflected philosophical questioning and a wild girl's coming of age, a pitch-black farce and a sexual investigation that hinges upon the belief that, yes, women captain their destinies. And I can sense that everyone involved in the film - from screenwriter Tony McNamara, who adapted the novel by Alasdair Grey, to director Yorgos Lanthimos and leading lady Emma Stone, to even composer Jerskin Fendrix - is committed to these ragged, wide-ranging impulses. But those impulses are rancid. For a film whose camera is so obsessed with its lead actress's body, it is remarkably sterile on the subject… There's a corroded spirit to the story, like it's intermittently possessed by an edgelord who's unaware most women menstruate, and an early-wave white feminist who believes having sex is the most empowering thing a woman can do. (For all the fucking, there is no menstrual blood!) In many ways, the film demonstrates the limits of the modern cis-male auteur's vision for and about women - particularly their sexual selves. Watching it for any sort of feminist revelation is akin to craving the salty chill of the ocean and the spray of a wave upon your face, and having to settle for resting your ear against a curling seashell, listening to only the echo of what you truly desire… This isn't a sincere treatise on female sexuality, it's a dark comedy for people who carry around an NPR tote bag.”

Nothing I write will ever be that good, but it does inspire me that I will someday get something published, given the fact that Poor Things is receiving so much praise and love despite its lack of depth and its simultaneous insistence that it is deep. In the end, Poor Things was the perfect film to pair with The Holdovers—no matter how disparate the two may seem, they both had brief moments of comedy that ultimately were not enough to save either film. I left both films feeling oddly amused but mostly dissatisfied, the vibrant emotions and experiences that were promised were hardly thrilling enough to write about, and while I love Emma Stone, I don’t think she should win that Best Actress Oscar over Lily Gladstone or Sandra Hüller. I hate to be a hater, dear reader, but I promise that I really really tried to like these films and I just feel mostly nothing for them. As of right now, my ranking of the Best Picture nominees goes: Barbie, Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall, American Fiction, Oppenheimer, The Holdovers, Killers of the Flower Moon, Poor Things—but who knows, maybe I’ll watch give Bradley Cooper’s sophomore slump a try and love it, but I have little faith at this point. Thank you for allowing me to be a hearty hater this week, readers, and if you’re just as sick of Oscars talk as I am, don’t worry—next week we’ll be free. Ta ta for now!