Film reviews: The Holdovers | Mean Girls
The Holdovers (15) *****
Mean Girls (12A) *
Reuniting with Paul Giamatti for the first time since Sideways, The Holdovers sees Alexander Payne return with one of his funniest, sharpest, and most humane comedies to date – an acutely observed redemption story exploring the chip-on-shoulder bitterness its protagonist feels at being smarter than the elites whose world he isn’t gutsy enough to reject. Instead, Giamatti’s Paul Hunham, a teacher of ancient history at a boys private school in Massachusetts circa 1970, has settled into a comfortable, bubble-like existence, one where he can express his superior intellect in exasperated put-downs of his privileged students and take pride in daring to fail the blithely mediocre children of the rich and powerful as they glide through prep school en route to some well-remunerated, nepotistism-sourced career.
Like Matthew Broderick’s more idealistically motivated educator in Payne’s 1999 classic Election, he views himself as a necessary hurdle in his students’ path through life. But his pomposity is about to catch up with him. With the fictional Barton Academy covered in snow and about to break for the Christmas holidays, he suddenly finds himself dragooned into looking after a handful of students unable to join their own families. He knows he’s being punished for failing a senator’s son. As such, it’s not all that hard to be on Paul’s side, even before we realise he’s got a lazy eye and suffers from a genetic condition that gives him a fishy smell only partially disguised by the daily stench of booze and pipe smoke emanating from him. The film doesn’t milk these afflictions to create sympathy, though. Working from David Hemingson’s smart, funny script, Payne and Giamatti work hard to ensure this wreck of a human transcends the tweedy clichés of the curmudgeonly academic.
Advertisement
Hide AdWe first get a sense that there’s more to him than meets the eye in the easy, empathetic bond he forms with Mary (the fantastic Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s Black cafeteria manager, whose son, a former Barton student, has recently been killed in Vietnam and who’s staying on at school because the prospect of spending her first Christmas without him is too much to bear by herself. When Paul admonishes one of his more arrogant charges for disrespecting her, we get the sense it’s borne out of some kind of deep-rooted class-consciousness, not just a progressive or showy sense of decency.
But Paul’s grinch-like demeanour is also challenged by one of his students, Angus Tully, a petulant, unpopular, trouble-making smart-mouth, wonderfully played by newcomer Dominic Sessa. Abandoned at the last minute by his mother, who decides to use the Christmas break for an impromptu honeymoon with her new husband, Angus finds himself abandoned again when a plot twist reduces the number of student holdovers from five to one, meaning he has to see the rest of the holidays out with Mary and, ugh, Paul.
What follows as this oddball trio negotiate the solitude of the holidays with bad TV, cheap booze, one slapstick medical emergency and occasional trips off campus isn’t exactly unpredictable, but the quiet ways in which it arrives at its moments of emotional catharsis, enlightenment and redemption (it is a Christmas story after all) are moving in unexpected ways. It helps that Payne immerses us so thoroughly in the cinematic world of its 1970/71 setting. Harking back to the rigorously unsentimental films of the New Hollywood era is a good fit for Payne, whose comic instincts have, in the past, sometimes erred towards condescending snark (see About Schmidt and The Descendants). Here he strikes a better balance, concocting a funny, bittersweet paean to the implicit value of learning to be less of an asshole in life.
The movie based on the musical based on the movie based on the book, the new version Mean Girls is about as stale as you might expect from this two-decade-plus trajectory. First released in 2004, the Tina Fey-scripted original quickly became a millennial teen classic, briefly making a star of the troubled Lindsay Lohan and launching the careers of Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried and Fey herself, who subsequently made the jump from Saturday Night Life to her own show 30 Rock, which further refined nerd/popular girl power dynamic at the core of Mean Girls.
Given that Fey is back on board as this musical remake’s writer (she also reprises her role as sympathetic teacher Ms Norbury), one might have hoped for an updated raft of gags skewering the cliques and indignities of high school life for today’s social media-savvy teens. But no: in Mean Girls 2024, the same cliques exist, the same jokes get recycled, only now there are fewer of them, thanks to having to make space for a lot of dismally unfunny songs that play like sincere tributes to Billie Eilish when a smarter film would have used Eilish’s introspective electro-pop to serve up sly – or even broad – take-downs of the never-changing solipsism of teenage life.
In the Lohan role, Angourie Rice (so great in The Nice Guys) has so little to work with as the formerly home-schooled Cady she doesn’t so much come off as naive as somewhat dim. Likewise, much of the supporting cast come off as the dumb clichés their characters are supposed to be subverting. Renée Rapp, imported from the stage musical, also struggles to make Cady’s frenemy nemesis Regina George a formidable screen villain. Thoroughly pointless.
The Holdovers is on general release from 19 January; Mean Girls is on general release from 17 January