It’s an A+ for Giamatti’s trio of boarding school misfits
And top marks, too, for Tina Fey’s all-singing modern-day Mean Girls
The Holdovers (15A, 133 mins) Verdict: Payne-fully poignant ★★★★☆
Mean Girls (12A, 112 mins) Verdict: Exuberant fun ★★★★☆
APAIR of school-based films both require your attendance this week. The Holdovers is set in an all-boys boarding school in New England where crusty, irascible, world-weary classics teacher Paul Hunham (a role practically machine-tooled for the wonderful Paul Giamatti) has spent his entire career, having also been a pupil there back in the mists of time.
Giamatti won a Golden Globe earlier this month for his pitch-perfect performance, which marks his second collaboration with director Alexander Payne, 20 years after the brilliant Sideways (2004). But where Sideways was based on a novel, this is an original story, conceived by Payne but scripted, very nicely, by David Hemingson, an experienced TV writer but feature-film debutant.
This is Payne’s seventh film but only the second (after another beauty, 2013’s Nebraska) that he hasn’t written himself.
Nonetheless, like so many of the others (Sideways, Election, About Schmidt), it is a wry, intelligent, bittersweet comedy with crossgenerational appeal (my son, in his 20s, liked it even more than I did).
The narrative is simple enough. It’s December 1970 and unmarried, unloved Mr Hunham is preparing for the holidays when the headmaster, who cordially loathes him, gives him the unenviable job of looking after the ‘holdovers’, the boys who for whatever reason can’t get home for Christmas.
One of them is a bright but rebellious lad called Angus (superbly played by newcomer Dominic Sessa), who ends up as the only holdover, resentfully holed up in a big, otherwise empty building in the strangest of menages-a-trois, with Mr Hunham and the African-American school cook, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, also terrific and also a Golden Globe winner).
She has even more reason than the others to be angry at the world — her son has recently been killed in Vietnam — yet her humanity shines through her sadness.
By increments, this unlikely trio become friends, learning from each other as they do. That’s hardly a spoiler — going back to To Sir With Love (1967), The Blackboard Jungle (1955) and well beyond, teacher-pupil friction runs a predictable course in the movies.
But Payne’s film is beautifully paced, genuinely funny at times and truly sad at others. And he cleverly presents it in washed-out colours, almost as if it were made, not just set, in 1970. It’s another A+ for one of the best directors of his generation.
■ MEANWHILE, Mean Girls is set in a very different educational establishment — a caricature of a smalltown US high school. Two whole decades have now passed since the original Mean Girls came out; plenty of those girls in their early teens who dragged their mothers to see it are now parents themselves, with better things to do than gather their old pals and head to the pictures on a cold January night, perhaps after a few gussied-up cocktails. But they should.
This version, not a straight remake, but an exuberant musical, based on the 2018 Broadway show, is a blast. I confess I sloped into the media screening with a slightly heavy heart, expecting to endure rather than enjoy, yet I loved it. It’s tremendous fun.
The original film boasted quite a cast: Tina Fey (pictured left, who also wrote the screenplay), Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amy Poehler, and Amanda Seyfried in her feature-film debut.
The leads this time are a little less illustrious, though who knows what lies ahead? Australian actress Angourie Rice is perfectly cast as Cady Heron, who, having been home-schooled in Kenya by her earnest zoologist mother (Jenna Fischer), is plunged into the bitcheat-bitch world of North Shore High, where busty, glossy-lipped Regina George (the excellent Reneé Rapp, who played the role on Broadway) rules the roost.
To mix metaphors even further, she’s the school’s imperious queen bee, queening it even over the teachers. To be in her gang is to share her status: ‘She’s the queen of beasts and I’m in her pride/ I have hitched a ride…with the apex predator.’
The ensuing narrative sees the nervous, impressionable Cady bullied by Regina and her acolytes, collectively known as ‘the Plastics’.
YET, against all the odds, Cady gradually acquires the nous and nastiness to usurp the apex predator. It’s delightfully done and significantly the writer is Fey again (left), also reprising her role as maths teacher Mrs Norbury, with Jon Hamm in a funny but fleeting role as the gym coach and one other cameo that it might be better not to disclose. There’s a laugh-outloud performance too from Busy Philipps as Regina’s silly, synthetic mum, who solemnly tells her, after Cady has masterminded the sly campaign to make Regina put on weight, that ‘real beauty comes from … the face’.
It’s a perfectly timed, very funny subversion of the old ‘beauty from within’ platitude in a film that doesn’t hold too many surprises for fans of the original, nor in truth has been universally welcomed, but for me was full of January cheer.