New(ish) Releases: "The Holdovers," "Ferrari," "Four Daughters," "Stranger and the Fog"
Warning: the following contains plot spoilers for The Holdovers!
Is outright cynicism better than a veneer of hollow sentimentality? That’s a question I asked myself throughout Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, which continues the director’s penchant for disguising maudlin cliches as strokes of emotional honesty. I should admit I’ve never been a huge fan of Payne, with a few exceptions: the brutally funny Election (1999), the surprisingly absurd Downsizing (2017). More often, I find his brand of middlebrow uplift hypocritical at best: About Schmidt (2002) pretends to expose the emptiness of the average American life, but relies on tearjerking gimmicks like Schmidt’s sponsorship of a six-year-old Tanzanian boy; Nebraska (2013) uses its black-and-white aesthetic and bitter humor to obscure what is essentially a generic, crowd-pleasing story (there’s even a montage where the townspeople applaud grumpy old Bruce Dern at the end!).
Sometimes I’m dismayed by the borderline nihilism of anti-humanist directors like the Coens or Paul Verhoeven. But watching The Holdovers made me realize that, in the case of those filmmakers, misanthropy is at least something like a legitimate worldview. What, on the other hand, is Payne trying to express with his predictable lessons about discarding life’s regrets and embracing its ups and downs? The philosophy of his films could often be summed up on the inside of a greeting card, though Payne goes to great lengths to make it appear more profound and complicated than it is.
The Holdovers is set at Barton Academy, a Massachusetts boarding school around Christmas break in 1970. The unconvincing historical setting mostly seems like an excuse to include faux-retro novelties like outdated logos over the opening credits and marks in the upper right corner of the frame to indicate reel changes, even though the movie was shot digitally. While I do enjoy the warmth and vibrancy of Eigil Bryld’s cinematography, I also think these tacked-on aesthetic quirks feel like desperate attempts to give the movie more personality than its story and themes would suggest.
The film follows a Scrooge-like professor named Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), who draws the short straw come winter break and is forced to stay on the school’s grounds during the holiday to take care of the few remaining students. One of those students is Angus (Dominic Sessa), whose rich parents have abandoned him to vacation in Europe, leaving him without a family at Christmastime. Paul and Angus initially butt heads—the bitter, old pedant versus the supposedly smoldering teenage hothead—but you don’t have to be a genius to guess whether the two of them find a begrudging intimacy by the end of the movie.
Each of these characters has a backstory that supposedly lends them depth: Paul was professionally humiliated after a false accusation of plagiarism at Harvard; Angus’s father had a mental breakdown and was institutionalized. These storylines feel like they were plucked out of a hat in a creative writing exercise. If they were to be emotionally impactful, they would have to be presented in ways other than the lumbering exposition and dreary melodrama offered by The Holdovers.
Also present at the school during Christmas break are two Black characters: the cook, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and Danny (Naheem Garcia), a janitor. Mary also has a tragic backstory: her son, unable to attend Barton, is forced to enter the military draft during the Vietnam War and dies in combat. This backstory is arguably more moving than anything that happens to Paul or Angus (at least it has a dash of social commentary), but Mary and Danny (who is offered no such character depth) mostly function as signs of the white characters’ open-mindedness. They’re moral barometers for the film’s real protagonists, and Payne uses them in dramatically manipulative ways that reveal the movie’s lack of human insight and racial sensitivity.
It’s almost jarring how little Payne and company make an effort to express these cliches in original ways. Two scenes stand out to me: a montage in which Paul and Angus start warming to each other (in New York City, no less!) as Cat Stevens plays on the soundtrack; and a bittersweet farewell punctuated by the solemnly uttered line, “See ya.” These are moments that should be included in a parody of a heartwarming drama, not a film presented in all earnestness.
All of this might have made for an agreeable (if shallow) piece of holiday fluff, but The Holdovers has the nerve to be two hours and fifteen minutes—about twice as long as the film’s emotional and thematic depth really warrants. Some critics find the movie’s throwback nostalgia charming—it is, ostensibly, a modest character study with the shagginess of a ‘70s independent film—but what The Holdovers really harks back to is an age where the same old voices took precedence in Hollywood, telling the same old stories in the same old ways.
Another disappointing throwback (in wildly different ways) is Michael Mann’s Ferrari, the culmination of a decades-long passion project for the director. Adam Driver plays the auto tycoon (and former racer) Enzo Ferrari in the summer of 1957, as he’s juggling numerous personal and professional crises: his tempestuous marriage with his wife, Laura (Penélope Cruz), which is still recovering from the death of their son one year prior; his affair with his mistress, Lina (Shailene Woodley), with whom he has another son; his preparations for the upcoming Mille Miglia cross-Italy race; and his machinations to partner with another car company to avoid insolvency.
Let me say upfront that Michael Mann and Alexander Payne are in different directorial leagues; Mann is one of the best action/crime directors in recent American cinema, with an incredible run that included Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), and the underrated Ali (2001). I’d also stick up for Mann’s 2015 dud Blackhat, a fascinating vision of terrorism and warfare in the digital age. But Ferrari offers a retrograde throwback in that it glorifies stoic, obsessive men who have only their passion and their genius to guide them—a worldview that could describe any number of male voices from Hollywood’s heyday (and which could also describe 2023’s Oppenheimer).
Subplots in Ferrari like the death of Enzo and Laura’s son (conveyed via brief scenes of Enzo visiting and speaking to his son’s grave) or Enzo’s affair with Lina feel shoehorned in, biopic-style. These are just the flaws that come with his maverick nature, the movie suggests; his inability to grieve with his wife or remain faithful is what you get when you’re dealing with a brilliant personality.
Adding to Ferrari’s lack of verisimilitude is the fact that most of the characters are Italian, but they speak accented English (Woodley is especially unconvincing as Lina)—a relic of classical Hollywood that makes it impossible to believe these events are happening in Italy in the late ’50s. This may sound like nitpicking, but I’d rather see Italian actors give these performances in subtitled dialogue—a concession to accuracy that shouldn’t be impossible when global coproductions are numerous and audiences are generally more willing to read subtitles. (As much as I love Ava Gardner playing a Spanish woman in The Barefoot Contessa, or even Charlton Heston playing a Mexican in Touch of Evil, we no longer have to abide by the 1950s’ standards of representation.)
A few moments of Mann’s blunt poetry still come through in Ferrari: a thrilling opening in which Driver-as-Enzo appears as a race car driver in footage that looks like it’s from the silent era; a montage set to La Traviata conveying the characters’ conflicting regrets. But for the most part, Ferrari is unconvincing, content to check off the bullet points on its “great man of history” biopic guideline.
As usual, in order to find more meaningful film experiences, it’s necessary to look beyond the Hollywood mainstream. (Unless it’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One, which is still one of my favorites of 2023.) Two counterexamples to The Holdovers and Ferrari come from Tunisia and Iran, respectively: the hypnotic fact-fiction hybrid Four Daughters and the recently restored Stranger and the Fog (which showed in 1974 at the Tehran International Film Festival and in 1976 in Toronto, then was unavailable for decades).
Four Daughters has quickly claimed its place as one of my favorites of 2023, a dizzyingly complex family portrait as humane as it is political. It follows a woman named Olfa, who has led a difficult life since childhood, inheriting many of the conflicts and miseries that her own mother experienced: an unhappy marriage, lack of opportunities, the feeling of being a pawn at the mercy of patriarchal governments. In the film, Olfa recounts her often combative relationship with her four daughters, the two oldest of whom—Ghofrane and Rahma—left home to join the Islamic State. These two characters are played by professional actors in Four Daughters, but Olfa and her younger daughters, Eya and Tayssir, play themselves. The result is a blend of documentary intimacy and mediated artifice that recalls some of Abbas Kiarostami’s fact-fiction hybrids, like Close-Up (1990) and Ten (2002), which arrive at a more honest version of the truth by laying bare their constructed nature. As boldly as those films explored complicated aspects of Iranian culture, Four Daughters interrogates that of Tunisia, presenting ideas about the violence of family, the harmful legacies of the past, the nature of the political subject, the intersection of politics and religion, beauty standards for women, an ever-widening array of themes.
Four Daughters was directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, whose primary goal is to empathize (in a distanced way) with Olfa and her daughters, who have experienced a great deal of trauma (but have guarded hope for the future). Her secondary aim is to poke at the fissures in Tunisian society, highlighting its injustices toward women with both outrage and a spirit of liberation. Ben Hania embraces these dualities with a careful visual style both intimate (the subjects often relate their stories onscreen, directly to the camera) and highly stylized (bold colors, geometric framings, harsh lighting). I’ve seen one other film by Ben Hania, Challat of Tunis (2013), which also uses a faux-documentary style to offer a brutal satire of Tunisian gender norms (it follows a filmmaker making a movie about a slasher who attacks “improperly dressed women” as he rides around Tunis). Clearly, using the tropes of film artifice to deepen and complexify an already-fraught reality is one of Ben Hania’s recurring motifs, and she masters it perfectly in Four Daughters.
The best movie I saw in theaters recently was actually made in 1974: the Iranian Stranger and the Fog, written and directed by Bahram Beyzaie, a haunting precursor to the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Beyzaie’s film premiered in Tehran in 1974, but it was deemed “incomprehensible” and “anti-religious” by the post-revolution government and banned for decades. Only last year was the film restored by the Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project and Cineteca di Bologna, allowing audiences to discover this long-lost classic of the Iranian New Wave.
Drenched in fog, sumptuous shadows, and some of the most vivid use of light you’ll see in any movie, Stranger and the Fog sometimes plays like folk horror, sometimes like enigmatic social commentary, sometimes like dark comedy. It begins with a boat drifting ashore in an insular village on the Persian Gulf. A man is inside the boat, bloody and unconscious. Once he’s revived, the man, Ayat (Khosrow Shojazadeh), claims he has no recollection of how he got there, leading the townspeople to (not unjustifiably) cast their suspicions upon him, believing he’ll lead his pursuers directly to them. But Ayat schemes to marry a beautiful widow named Rana (Parvaneh Massoumi) and stay among the community for protection—at least until he’s hunted down (or not) by other strangers with mysterious motives.
Beyzaie based the film on his own nightmares, which partially explains its dreamlike, cryptic logic. But there’s a political edge to Stranger and the Fog’s ambiguity, an overwhelming sense of dread and tension, with amorphous but very real threats lurking everywhere. The black-hooded figures that show up late in the film have indiscernible goals, rules, or laws; they don’t even admit they’re after you, but they haunt you nonetheless, ready to pounce. The vague terrors in Stranger and the Fog would reappear during and after the revolution in disturbingly concrete form, imprisoning dissidents and clamping down on artists with fierce censorship restraints. Stranger and the Fog is like a final, beleaguered sigh before the onset of the revolution, an eerie fable that still manages to show great compassion for its female protagonist, Rana, who brazenly claims whatever power and independence are available to her in this world.
It’s also one of the most beautiful films I’ve ever seen: Stranger and the Fog feels thick with light, enlivened by tracking shots that range from quick and kinetic to long and serene. It can’t have been easy to arrange these complicated camera movements on uneven, muddy terrain, but Beyzaie and cinematographers Mehrdad Fakhimi and Firooz Malekzadeh manage a stunning visual environment, with rain, wind, and fog fierce and tactile. Stranger and the Fog as a whole is completely immersive, a one-of-a-kind classic that’s my first great cinematic experience of 2024, even though it was made fifty years ago. It might sound obvious or elitist to say so, but in my rush to catch up on acclaimed 2023 releases—some of which, like The Holdovers and Ferrari, are mired in outdated tropes and perspectives—it’s the under-the-radar films from around the world that provide the most exhilarating breath of fresh air.