Joy

2023 Oscars Best Picture Review: The Holdovers

Jon The Blogcentric1 Comment
From left to right: Dominic Sessa, Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph make for unlikely Christmas guests in The Holdovers.

DISCLAIMER: This is from a blog of four reviews I originally posted on March 2, 2024. The original blog has been removed.

At first, you’ll wonder if The Holdovers is the right movie for the Christmas Season or a bad movie for the Season. Not every Christmas movie is a guaranteed hit and there have been some bad ones in the past. Can The Holdovers do all the right moves?

There have been Christmas movies in the past that start as downers but then develop into a film that doesn’t just celebrate Christmas, but celebrates humanity too. It’s A Wonderful Life is possibly the biggest such film that comes to mind. Here we have another story. Set in 1970, we have a teacher at a boarding school whom all the students hate and has no real family or friends. A student of his who gets left behind at the school during Christmas because of his mother leaving him behind for Christmas with her new boyfriend. The school cook who has lost her son in the Vietnam War and feels the hurt at Christmas time. Can the Christmas spirit be present with these three together?

In a film like this, it’s hard to sense if this film has a social theme. We see see how so many of the Best Picture nominees have a social theme in the film which has something to say. I can’t really sense a theme or topic in this film that stands out in a grand way. If a theme made in a soft way, I think it’s about classism and elitism. We should remember Paul Hunhan is a teacher at the Barton Academy boarding school full of boys of some of the most privileged backgrounds. He teaches the classics and is not afraid to fail them if they’re bad, even if the student’s father is wealthy and powerful. That annoys his boss Dr. Woodrup as one of the students Hunham failed, the father stopped donating and that stopped Woodrup from being promoted to Princeton. Adding to the theme of elitism, Hunham himself was a student at the school and attended on a scholarship. Hunham almost sank his future after he deliberately hit one of his Harvard classmates with a car, but Barton was sympathetic enough to hire him as their classics teacher. Adding to elitism is the cook Mary Lamb: an African-American woman who was able to get her son Curtis to attend the Academy because of her employment. After he graduated, he had to pay his way through college and enlisted in the army to do so, only to die in the Vietnam War.

There’s no doubt the themes of privilege and classism abound in this film. There are also parts in the film that remind us all that privilege and classism is not a shelter for everything. The one who best reminds us of that is Angus Tully. Angus is a student who actually does very well in Hunham’s class, but still shows the common troubling behavior of teens, which gets on Hunham’s nerves a lot. Over time, Hunham learns Tully is not the typical privileged brat he sees him as. He learns that Tully is a lonely boy from a broken home. Tully first tells Hunham his father’s dead, but soon learns his father is in a mental hospital. A privileged background doesn’t prevent you from having parents with mental illness. On top of that, Tully has a mother who seems to care more about her new boyfriend than him. That’s another thing with privileged children; having hyper-ambition parents who care more about themselves and often neglect their kids. While Hunham and Mary appear to be victims of a system of classism and privilege, Tully appears to be one living in this privilege but experiencing the harsh side-effects of it. Seeing Tully’s background could give you empathy for Barron Trump! Even that scene where they show a memorial on Veteran’s Day and they memorialize the alumni killed in wars, it’s a reminder that privilege won’t stop you from dying young in a war.

I know I talked a lot about privilege and classism in this film, but it’s an underlying theme in the story. The story is about three different people who don’t want to be together trying to have a Christmas together. When have the classics teacher who has made the boarding school his home since his job and has no problem making a loner of himself or being hated by the students. We have one of his students who can’t stand Hunham and is frustrated with having no one for Christmas. We also have the cook who is not only struggling to be happy after the death of her son but trying to find reason to live. Can they have a good Christmas? Can they get along together? In the end, the Christmas becomes a time when they warm up to each other and get to understand each other better. Angus doesn’t see Hunham as a jerk teacher and starts to understand his love for the classics. Hunham doesn’t see Angus as a jerk student, but rather a boy who needs the closeness of his family. Most importantly, to be reunited with his mentally ill father. Mary Lamb falls in love with the janitor Danny and is reunited with her sister and her family. That scene with the four celebrating New Year’s together shows they did have a Merry Christmas after all. Even if Hunham would get fired for his actions being out of Barton protocol.

This is another great achievement from Alexander Payne. In the past, most of his films have been stories about a man’s feelings of failures. The films he’s done in the past have won him acclaim and even three Best Director nominations. Here he takes a change of direction with a Christmas story with a man as the protagonist, but also as much a story of a student who’s lonely and a cook who feels empty on the inside. It’s a story that makes for the most unlikely of Merry Christmases and somehow makes the merriness happen. We should also thank scriptwriter David Hemingson for that. Hemingson has established himself as a renowned sitcom writer. This is his first film screenplay and it comes out shining. It gets into a deep story but it also remains humorous and keeps the Christmas merry.

Excellent acting again comes Paul Giamatti. If you’ve seen Giamatti act before, you know he knows how to do excellent character work. Giamatti has worked with Payne before in 2004’s Sideways: the film that got Payne his first Best Director Oscar nod. Here, Giamatti is the perfect fit as the curmudgeonous sadistic teacher who actually is a disheartened man who becomes an unlikely friend to a troubled teen. Also worthy of respect is Da’Vine Joy Randolph. Her performance of the cook who lost her soon and tries to keep from hurting is great. Especially since you could sense that there would be a time she can’t hold it in any longer. Her performance stands out and even makes you think the story is as much about Mary Lamb as it is about Hunham. Also great is the performance of Dominic Sessa. He has never acted before and he had the luck as the prep school he attended happened to be the location of this film’s shooting location and he caught the eyes of the casting directors. He’s the right fit in playing a boy who’s smart and arrogant about it, but lonely and hurting on the inside. Sad Fact: Sessa’s own father died when he was 14. Also a great job of Eigil Bryld with the cinematography. Normally for a Payne film, it does a good job of capturing the region. This cinematography was different as it added to the story.

The Holdovers is an unlikely Christmas film that does what a Christmas film should, despite the story appearing to pave the way for something depressing, at first. In the end, it’s about three people unlikely to be friends whose lives improve because of each other. An unlikely treat for those lucky to see it.

Movie Review: Joy

Jon The Blogcentric1 Comment

jennifer-lawrence-joy-trailer
Joy stars Jennifer Lawrence as inventor and Home Shopping Network personality Joy Mangano.

Don’t ever think that the world owes you anything, because it doesn’t. The world doesn’t owe you a thing.

I’m sure before you go to see Joy, you’ll think you’ve seen all the rags-to-riches stories you’ve had to. However you’re in for a surprise.

The film is first set in the 1960’s when Joy Mangano is a child. She’s very creative and very inventive. Fast forward to 1989. Joy Mangano is the breadwinner to a household of four generations of family: her grandmother, her divorced mother and father, her overachieving half-sister, her ex-husband and her two children. She works as a ticket agent at a major airline. Not exactly an admirable job for someone that was valedictorian when she graduated.

“How did it go wrong?” Joy ponders. She was an inventive girl but that all changed when her mother and father divorced. It was like her creativity went with her. She married a wedding singer with high hopes but his dreams fell apart and so did their marriage, albeit left amicable enough for him to still live in Joy’s house. Hey, he’s broke! Actually all the family’s lives appear unchanging as her father is dating the wrong women and her mother escapes the pain of divorce by locking herself in her bedroom and watching soaps. The one thing that stayed solid and has kept on going right over they years was Joy’s friendship to Jackie, her best friend since grade school.

One day, her father dates a new woman: an Italian woman named Trudy. She comes from a wealthy background and takes the whole family on the family yacht. A wine bottle breaks and Joy is left to mop it. She gets her hands cut trying to remove the broken glass from the mop. While recovering from her cuts, that’s when her inventiveness comes back. She has an idea for a self-cleaning mop and she’s willing to design it with something as simple as paper and her daughter’s crayons. Her mother is discouraging of her to chase her dreams but her grandmother is more supportive.

However she knows the difficulties of making something and merchandising it. She knows there’s someone who has a patent for something similar and has to agree to pay a certain percentage. She knows she will need financial support. Trudy is willing to offer but she’s very stern with whom she’s willing to support. She knows she will need a place to get the mop made. Her father offers her space in his workshop and women hired to make the mop. She even finds a factory willing to make the parts.

Then comes the advertising. She’s unable to get a deal and is subject to advertising her mop in K-Mart parking lots which is illegal. However she catches the attention of Neil Walker, CEO of the shopping channel QVC. He is impressed with the product and is willing to get it advertised on the channel. However everything goes wrong when first advertised as the salesman, who is considered the top salesman of the channel, does everything wrong and there’s no sale. Joy however doesn’t quit and negotiates with Walker for her to sell the product herself on the channel. When she does the commercial, she is very nervous. However a helpful phone call from Jackie while live on the air is just the boost she needs and it works. Her mop is a hit and it succeeds in getting her mops sold and paying her off.

However it doesn’t end there. Her success happens as her grandmother, the person who believed in Joy all along, dies. Then there’s news about excessive production fees paid. Joy goes to the factory and finds out a lot of bad truths about what has been happening and what’s being planned. Feeling helpless, Joy is about to file for bankruptcy until she finds out a certain truth and settles the score.

The movie isn’t just simply about a rags-to-riches story about a woman who was able to make it as a tycoon. It’s also a reminder that even in tight economic times, the American Dream is still achievable. Even in cases where there are obstacles thrown in your face like an advertiser who doesn’t do their job right or even lawsuits left, right and centre, it can still be done. We shouldn’t forget that Joy Mangano was making this all happen during the recession of the 90’s. I remember that recession well as I remember young adults like myself at the time received a lot of neglect from the job markets. Joy was not only able to create a ‘better mousetrap’ but be able to make it sell. Sure she faced a lot of common business challenges and hard blow of the business world and yes, she may have thought of giving up but she prevailed in the end. Now she’s the one in control. The film shows that this is still very much possible today.

One thing I will have to say is that doing such a film of a person achieving the American Dream has been done countless times. For one to do such a story differently, they would have to make the right choices. David O. Russell tries to make some unique choices such as having the story told by the grandmother’s point of view, even in time periods when the grandmother is deceased. Even the ending where the story progresses to the present but flashes back to just after Joy won her legal dispute is another unique choice in storytelling. However it makes one question whether those were the right choices. I can understand the attempt to tell a story differently but did they work? I don’t think they were the best choices.

David O. Russell sure has made a name for himself in the last five years with films like The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. This is a new challenge for him to direct and co-write with Annie Mumolo a story about a female inventor and media personality. Not something I would normally associate with Russell. I will admit this is not his best work. There are times I even wondered if David O. Russell is the right director for such a movie. Nevertheless it’s still very professional despite some of the glitchy storytelling choices. I do give him and Mumolo kudos for telling this story of a woman who starts in a situation familiar with most Americans and turning it into a relatable success story. That is one of its best points. Even the human element of Joy Mangano is another excellent part of the film. The film is not just about a woman wanting to make a success of herself for her own purposes but also being someone for her own daughter to look up to. Joy goes from someone mocked by her half-sister in front of her own kids to being someone for her kids to look up to. That element is another plus.

No doubt Jennifer Lawrence owned the film. Of course the Hunger Games movies have made her a household name already at 25 but it’s Russell who knows how to bring out the best in Lawrence’s acting. In her third movie directed by Russell, she again masters a character many years older than her and comes out shining and in excellent style. Robert de Niro was also good as the trying father. However the biggest scene stealer of the supporting players had to be Isabella Rossellini as the new mother-in-law who means business. Actually all the actors in the film from those that played family members to Bradley Cooper as Neil Walker did a good job with their characters and made them entertaining to watch.

Joy is a good story about a woman who would not give up until she succeeds even after everything that could go against her was thrown at her. However it’s also a reminder that the American Dream is still possible even in the toughest of times. Not exactly the best film from David O. Russell but definitely worth seeing.