The Holdovers is a bittersweet symphony of life

When curmudgeonly New England classics teacher Paul Hunham makes the ‘mistake’ of honestly marking the work of a bad student at Barton Academy, with the consequence that the boy’s wealthy father backtracks on a donation to the school, he is punished by the headteacher (one of the first pupils he himself taught) by being forced to babysit the ‘holdovers’ – any boys who have to stay at the school over the Christmas holiday in 1970.

The five that do remain include troubled Angus Tully, whose mother and new stepfather have decided they don’t want him around for a delayed festive honeymoon.

Making up the film’s central trio is Mary Lamb, the head of the school’s cafeteria. A single black mother, she took the job so that her son could have an education as a ‘Barton Boy’. But a lack of funds meant he couldn’t go on to college and instead, was conscripted into the military and died in Vietnam earlier that year.

Initially antagonistic, the inevitable happens as relationships between the three slowly thaw. What avoids this all descending into chiché is David Hemingson’s excellent script and Alexander Payne’s excellent direction – both of which allow the audience to slowly come to understand and empathise with the protagonists – and the performances of the leading actors.

It also allows a commentary on racism, class, mental health, and the importance of education; in particular, that of history – both global and personal.

Making his film debut as Angus, Dominic Sessa has already picked up several best newcomer awards and is up for a Bafta later this year as supporting actor. It’s a remarkably assured performance, full of awkwardness and vulnerability, but shot through with a self-destructive anger.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary brings toughness and vulnerability to the role, and she and the film thankfully avoid tropes of a suffering black character. Having already picked up a Golden Globe, she’s nominated in the supporting actress category for both the Baftas and the Oscars.

And so to Paul Giamatti as the central grouch. He absolutely shines in the role of the misanthropic teacher. There are moments of great humour here – not least in terms of his pomposity – but as with the others, it’s a performance that slowly reveals the character’s vulnerabilities.

Giamatti too picked up a Golden Globe and has best actor nominations for both London and LA.

The Holdovers is proving an awards dark horse, threatening the juggernaut that is Oppenheimer. Having seen it, there’s no surprise to this. Indeed, the only shock is that it took until the second half of January for this to be released in the UK, given that it is a quintessential Christmas movie, which is already being lauded as one of the very best of that species.

A real bittersweet joy. Film making on an absolutely human scale, with story and dialogue taking the lead. Do see.

Blue Velvet: The dark underbelly of the American Dream

For the second day running, a birthday present from my niece gave me the opportunity to catch up on an iconic film that I’ve never quite got around to watching. In this case, David Lynch’s 1986 Blue Velvet – an “adult fairytale”, according to the BFI.

Why have I not seen it before? Largely, I think, because I’d wondered if I’d find it ‘too much’, such is its reputation and also, because inevitably, I’d seen fleeting clips of Dennis Hopper inhaling something that turns his character more psychotic and dangerous than ever.

Writer and director Lynch opens the film with surreal scenes of a sugar-sweet, small-town America; an immaculate white picket fence, red roses and a blue sky – redolent of the Stars and Stripes – and a fire truck moving down a street in slo-mo, with a fireman on the back waving directly toward the camera, a dalmatian sitting alongside him. Then a middle-aged man watering his lawn, while his wife inside the house watches a crime mystery on the TV.

So far, so good. But then the gardener has an accident with his hose (the implement seems almost to turn on him) and everything is spun on its head, as the film dives beneath the carefully manicured grass to find a churning mass of insects in the dark below.

The gardener is Tom Beaumont. Hospitalised, he’s visited by his son, Jeffrey, who has returned from college because of the accident. But on the way home after his visit, Jeffrey discovers a human ear in a field, which he takes to the police station, to a Detective John Williams, who’s also a family neighbour.

Later, after he’s called on Williams at home to see if there is any news, Sandy, the policeman’s daughter, stops him in the street to say she’s overheard that the ear somehow relates to a nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens. Fascinated by the idea of a mystery, Jeffrey decides to investigate – and is drawn into the word of psychopathic gangster and drug dealer Frank Booth.

So the film moves from surrealism into noir. But this is no conventional noir. The hero, for instance, in no hard-boiled, cynical character – à la Bogart in The Big Sleep – but a boyish ingenu.

Likewise, neither the ‘good girl’ (Sandy; blonde) nor the ‘femme fatale’ (Dorothy; dark haired) fit simply into those cinematic cliches. Both are more complex.

And that’s before we get to Frank (left, with Dorothy), with all the suggestions that at least an element of his ultra-violence is down to self-loathing: is he straight, gay or bi?

It’s never a bigger question than in an extraordinary scene when Frank and his thugs have dragged Jeffrey and Dorothy to the den of fellow drug dealer Ben. There, the camp, made-up ‘Suave’ Ben lip-synchs to Roy Orbison’s In Dreams, right at Frank, as though in an act of seduction, moving him to tears of rage or something else.

Right after, before beating Jeffrey, Frank smears the young man’s lips with lipstick and savagely kisses him.

Is this about toxic masculinity and the pressures to conform to heteronormative stereotypes? It’s certainly about power relationships; Frank’s exercise of power over everyone in his orbit – except Ben, who seems to have the upper hand there – and Dorothy’s over Jeffery are both crucial, but there is also the question of who exercises the power in the relationship between Sandy and Jeffrey.

There are so many things to take in here. Sandy, in her blonde innocence, nods back to 1978’s Grease and the leading character of the same name. The naming of the ‘femme fatale’ begs the question: is Frank (who is obsessed with her) really a ‘friend of Dorothy’?

Then there’s the contrast between the darkness and violence of the film and the two big musical themes – Bobby Vinton’s cover of 1950 song Blue Velvet by Bernie Wayne and Lee Morris, and Orbison’s 1963 In Dreams – as if they hark back nostalgically to a gentler time and their use by Lynch is a subversion of that ‘gentler time’ – a time that was suggested by the opening shots.

It was far from universally acclaimed when it came out, but Lynch’s film has more than stood the test of time and well deserves its status as a classic.

The central cast is excellent. Isabella Rossellini as Dorothy is strong and vulnerable at the same time. Kyle MacLachlan is suitably innocent as Jeffrey, finding himself out of his depth when drawn toward a stranger world than he had previously imagined possible. Laura Dern makes Sandy both plausibly girlish, yet also with a tough core.

But it’s Hopper who dominates the film as Frank, in a performance that is absolutely riveting; even when you want to flinch and look away, you cannot.

The supporting cast are largely sketches – with one exception. Dean Stockwell’s Ben (left) – albeit a one-scene turn – is simply exceptional.

Lynch wraps it up with a ‘happily ever after’ finale, which returns us to the surreal openings, but with the addition of an animatronic robin, which reiterates the message that all this is really just artifice and wishful thinking. Indeed, the film it culminates with a repeat of those very first sequences.

But by now, we are well aware of the dark underbelly of such an American Dream. Brilliant.

• Femme is a 2023 film takes a deeper dive into the theme of sexuality-driven self loathing. 

Cult classic Phantom of the Paradise proves camp fun

Thanks to a birthday present from my niece, I’ve just seen Brian de Palma’s 1974 cult classic, Phantom of the Paradise, for the first time – and what a watch.

A rock musical comedy horror, it brings together reworkings of The Phantom of the Opera, Faust and The Picture of Dorian Gray, to tell the story of naïve songwriter Winslow Leach, who allows himself to be conned out of his magnum opus, a rock cantata of the Faust legend, by one of the henchmen of music producer Swan.

By the time he realises, it’s too late – and Swan unscrupulously has him beaten up, framed and jailed. But Leach escapes and heads toward the Paradise Club, which Swan is going to launch with a production of the cantata, to seek revenge – and rescue Phoenix, a talent singer that the producer is exploiting.

De Palma both wrote and directed it, and it goes at a frenetic pace for it’s 91 minutes. His send up of the music business was seen by many at the time as essentially pointless – remember what rock was like in the 1970s? – but the energy and the campness of the whole affair carry it through.

In terms of the campness, it’s interesting to note that it came out a year after The Rocky Horror Show premiered on stage in London, so arguably very much of a piece with that.

William Finlay does a fine job as the naïve songwriter/tortured phantom of the title, while Paul Williams makes a deeply disturbing Swan – looking rather like a short Brian Connolly from '70s glam rockers The Sweet.

He also wrote all the songs – his other musical credits include the score for Alan Parker’s 1976 film, Bugsy Malone).

Gerrit Graham makes a fine, campy turn as Beef, an over-the-top rock singer, while Jessica Harper, in her debut, as appropriately sweet and gutsy as Phoenix.

There’s a huge amount to take in visually. For instance, I loved that the stage set of the opening to Faust the musical, together with the costumes and makeup, recall Robert Weine’s German Expressionist masterpiece, Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, while there are scenes – more mocking of the 1970s music business – that are orgiastic in nature, as though like something out of Caligula’s court.

All in all, a most entertaining watch.

The world according to Louis Wain and his cats

In 1881, after the death of his father, Louis Wain becomes the primary breadwinner of his household, where he lives with his mother and five sisters, while working as a part-time illustrator for the Illustrated London News.

Editor Sir William Ingram wants him to go full-time, but despite the family finances being in tough shape, he initially says no, preferring to have some time for interests other than his art – not least attempting to get patents for his varied inventions and trying to compose an opera.

But his eldest sister Caroline, who has taken over running the house from their scatty mother, has hired a governess for the three younger girls, so Louis has to change his mind on the job offer.

Emily Richardson, the governess, is a hit in the household – and the eccentric Louis, who has never experienced romantic or sexual feelings before, finds that changing.

But after Emily causes an accidental scandal, Caroline decides to fire her – forcing Louis’s hand to start a courtship.

And once married, it is his wife who rescues a tiny kitten, who will then inspire Louis to start painting the cat pictures that were to make him famous – and had a major impact on the acceptability of keeping cats as pets in Victorian England.

This 2021 film, directed by Will Sharpe, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Simon Stephenson, is a whimsical biopic of a man who was, in many ways, very childlike and vulnerable.

Benedict Cumberbatch as Wain, and Claire Foy as Emily, are excellent leads, with Olivia Colman narrating and Toby Jones turning in a lovely supporting performance as Sir William.

There are also cameos to watch out from Taika Waititi, Richard Ayoade and Nick Cave – the latter, as HG Wells.

Erik Wilson’s cinematography feels both quirky in places and highly conventional in others, and it’s not certain that such a mix works perfectly. But in general, it’s a charming, sometimes funny and often moving, watch.

Femme is a serious take on the effects of self hatred

Currently on various streaming services – certainly Curzon Home, and with a limited Curzon cinema release to come – I learned about Femme because one of the directors, Sam H Freeman (Ng Choon Ping is the other), takes coffee at my local Haggerston Park kiosk, where I delight in discussing film (among other things), with the wonderful staff, one of whom told me about it.

I have just caught up with it – and it is well worth seeing.

Briefly, drag artist Joel is assaulted and finds his confidence and life shattered. But later, at a gay sauna, he sees his chief assailant – who doesn’t recognise him out of drag – and decides to get revenge on his deeply closeted attacker.

Grainy, grimy and not an easy watch, it is really well made and superbly acted – not least by Nathan Lloyd Stewart-Jarrett as Joel and George MacKay as Preston, his assailant and later lover.

There is a particularly wonderful scene where Joel secures an incredible psychological win against Preston’s homophobic, thuggish mates: with a console in his hands and Street Fighter on the screen, playing as a female fighting character – which is initially laughed at – he simply destroys all opposition in a format that they respect.

A really strong film about gay life – and about the struggle to come out of the closet in a world where it is not always remotely easy, not least in class terms – with an undercurrent of racism present too.

'Loop the fuckin' loop' – Shirley Valentine is a fab film

Shirley Valentine is a constant in my top 20 films – a revisit today, when it cropped up on Channel 5, was a welcome reminder as to why.

Adapted for the screen by Willy Russell from his own play, it tells the story of the unfulfilled, titular Liverpool housewife Shirley, who has lost a sense of herself, as she has been submerged (drowned?) in the traditional roles of wife to Joe and mother to Millandra and Brian.
 
Joe runs his own business in Liverpool and is clearly successful, as the couple live in a very middle-class part of the city, where it seems clear that Shirley feels a lot of imposter syndrome, being from a working-class background. Accent tells us a lot in this film.
 
When her flamboyant, feminist (no accent) friend Jane wins a trip for two to Greece, Shirley is persuaded to accompany her – without Joe knowing, as he has always refused to go abroad.
 
The trip sparks a reawakening for Shirley – a “holiday romance” with herself – as she finds the strength to be herself and live life for herself.
 
First released in 1989, it remains strikingly on point on class, snobbery, sex and how women are policed into certain specific and restrictive roles.
 
The film includes some of Shirley’s school experiences – where she is belittled in front of her fellow pupils by the headteacher, while the poshly-spoken Marjorie Majors is very much teacher’s pet.
 
Years later, she bumps into Marjorie again – and finds that her old enemy has become a high-class prostitute. It’s one more step toward Shirley herself asserting her own agency.
 
This is a cracking ensemble cast. Bernard Hill is very good as the clueless, Joe, saying he’s ready to forgive Shirley’s fling with Greek tavern owner Costas as just something silly that women going through “the change” do.
 
Joanna Lumley is a delight as Marjorie. The scene in the hotel, when she tells Shirley what she does, is a comic joy.
 
Alison Steadman is great as the hypocritical Jane – again, class features in her attituds toward Shirley.
 
George Costigan and Anna Keaveney as a working-class Manchester couple on the same holiday to Greece are a hoot, while Cardew ‘The Cad’ Robinson and Honora Burke add another dimension of English small-mindedness as a posh, elderly couple from London. The latter, turning their noses up at kleftiko – ‘lamb with oregano’ – prefer Shirley’s offer of egg and chips.
 
There are neat cameos from Julia McKenzie (no accent), as a posh neighbour who asks Shirley to feed her vegetarian bloodhound while she's away, and Sylvia Syms (no accent) as the bullying headteacher.
 
If there’s a problem with the film, it’s in Tom Conti’s incredibly hammy performance as Costas. It wouldn’t happen now – not least since it’s in sharp contrast to other Greek characters in the film who are portrayed in a much more authentic way.
 
Yet I could argue – and will (just about) – that the artifice of the performance works on a certain level, given the context of an essentially sexist stereotype. Conti’s cartoonish performance perhaps because it is a comment on the generalised attitudes of men in general rather than explicitly Mediterranean men. But it’s not a hill I’m going to die on.
 
However, Shirley recognises what a fake he is, accepts it and engages with it in a way that meets what she needs.
 
And of course, then there is Pauline Collins in the title role. A fabulous performance, which deservedly saw her win a BAFTA and an Evening Standard award. Never lapsing into sentimentality, it is a beautifully nuanced portrayal of a working-class, northern woman.
 
As I said at the top of this – I love this film. And writing this on a rewatch has helped remind me of just some of the reasons why.

A cracking mini hit of Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson’s latest film is a short – just 39 minutes – version of Roald Dahl’s short story, and it is a joy.

The titular character is the pseudonym of a wealthy bachelor gambler, who comes across a book of a doctor's report of a man who claimed he could see and interact without using his eyes.

By practising the meditations involved, Henry Strange manages to see through the backs of playing cards. He uses this ability to make millions, establishing a network of successful hospitals and orphanages.

All the usual identifiers of Anderson’s work are present, from the highly stylised look of the piece to the mannered performances.

And there is a typically wonderful ensemble cast – not least Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch, Ben Kingsley, Dev Patel and Richard Ayoade.

 

It is now streaming on Netflix.

Poor Things: Bonkers genius film targets the patriarchy

Yorgos Lanthimos – he of the postmodern film movement known as Greek Weird Wave – has done it again. The creative force of nature behind The Lobster and The Favourite has now given us Poor Things, based on the 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, and it’s pretty much off the scale in terms of weirdness.

A science fantasy black comedy, it tells the story of Bella Baxter, a well-to-do pregnant suicide in Victorian London, who is brought back to life – à la Frankenstein – by surgeon Dr Godwin ‘God’ Baxter, who replaces her damaged brain with that of her unborn child before rebooting her electronically.

Bella begins a new life with no memories of her previous one, in a fully formed adult body, but with a child’s mind that is developing at an extraordinary rate. However, she is completely unpolluted by social and patriarchal conditioning. So when she discovers female sexual pleasure, for instance, there is no shame whatsoever attached and she has an absolute openness to that – and other new experiences.

Godwin has attempted to keep her hidden, but his new assistant, medical student Max McCandles, becomes besotted with her, even as her rapid mental development makes her ever harder to control. So Godwin eventually consents to let her run off with a cad, lawyer Duncan Wedderburn, to find adventure.

This is stunning to look at, with a strong steampunk aesthetic, and all about how men do/try to police women’s bodies, sexual behaviour and agency. Every male character (and one female one) try to control Bella. It’s not always about control from a deliberately cruel perspective – it can be motivated by a need to feel protective, by genuine romantic feelings or a wish to educate philosophically – but some of the relationships are based entirely on controlling the “territory” of a woman.

Lanthimos’s film is one heck of a way to explore this. Do not watch if you are bothered by a lot of nudity (and yes, that includes male nudity) and a lot of explicit sex scenes, though these are absolutely not pornographic.

It was my longest watch for some time, but held me gripped throughout. Tony McNamara’s screenplay is excellent. Robbie Ryan’s cinematography is incredibly inventive, helping creating a real sense of a world turned upside down.

As I write this, I’m streaming Jerskin Fendrix’s fascinating, astringent soundtrack to the film.

Holly Waddington's costume design is brilliant, capturing a sense of Bella's development and liberation in a way that still feels Victorian/steampunk, while production designers James Price and Shona Heath deserve massive plaudits too.

And then we come to the cast. First – and because I don’t like to do spoilers, you’ll just have to go and see the film to find out who these actors play – praise for supporting cast members Christopher Abbott, Jerrod Carmichael, Hanna Schygulla and Suzy Bemba. Kathryn Hunter is stunning in her small role here – as you would expect, given her CV.

On to the leads. Willem Dafoe as Godwin brings real nuance to a role that, in lessor hands would – could – be very clunky and unsympathetic. Ramy Youssef as Max is charmingly naive, yet his performance always feels genuine. 

Mark Ruffalo is a (surprising) delight as Wedderburn, finding his own libertine morals turned utterly on their head by – say it quietly – a woman.

And then we come to Bella herself, played by Emma Stone. Wow. And wow again. What an extraordinary, utterly fearless performance. Just extraordinary. Simply sensational. Bella Baxter is my new household god(dess). We all knew Stone is a class act, but this is taking it to stratospheric levels.

It’s absolutely bonkers – and it’s absolute genius. I saw it today at a Curzon members’ preview. It opens in the UK on 12 January. With the provisos I laid out above – see it.

One Life: Remembering the 'British Schindler'

How do you make a film about rescuing children from the Nazis in 1939, without succumbing to clichés or sentimentality, yet ensuring that it also makes a deeply important statement about refugees and war in 2024?

Well, director James Hawes, together with screenwriters Lucinda Coxon and Nick Drake, have done a pretty good job with One Life, a film about Sir Nicholas Winton and his central involvement in organising the evacuation of – predominantly, but not only – Jewish children from Prague in 1939.

I’ve seen the film condemned as “workmanlike”. And that it doesn’t engage enough with what happened to those who were rescued – or remember those involved in the rescues besides Winton.

But having now watched it, this is nonsense. Yes, it is a very straightforward take on the story. Nothing wrong with that – and it is very clear that Winton himself was not the only one involved in rescuing over 660 children. Yet he played an absolutely crucial role in that.

In terms of the later stories of the children rescued from the Prague refugee camps and those told, via That’s Life in 1988, we start to learn of these.

It’s important history and utterly relevant today – but what elevates this as a film are the performances. Johnny Flynn is superb as the young Winton. Helena Bonham Carter, as Winton’s mother, is in absolutely stonking form.

And then there are the recreations of the That's Life! episodes. As Winton's wife, Grete, observes, it's a 'silly' TV show. Yet it created an iconic British TV moment when bringing Winton's story to the wider public – and reuniting him with some of those he had been involved in saving, without any silliness and with all seriousness. Which itself helped propel the story.

Samantha Spiro, as the show's host Esther Rantzen, does an extraordinary job here, portraying a major media figure, who is still very much with us.

And then there is Anthony Hopkins as the older Winton. His performance really gives the film the gravitas and power it needs. He can say so much more in a silence than most actors can, and captures Winton’s sense of guilt at those who couldn’t be saved in a way that is quietly explosive.

Go see it. And, as I did, weep. For the past, for the present and for the future.