The Flowers in the Corn: A Review of 'The Holdovers'
After quite the hiatus, Roberts is back to expiate on the culture we all live in--and to praise the movie 'The Holdovers'
The only decent way to watch a movie is while smoking--pick a cigarette, a blunt, a pipe or, my preference, a cigar. I have come to think that the downfall of cinematic value has some connection to the fact that the prudes won and turned every movie theater into such smokeless back rooms; now our films seem to have no fire or heat anymore, no matter how many pyrotechnics they use. There are those who defend such places and declare, with mindless certainty, that it matters where movies are watched (always saying it must be in a movie theater), and they misunderstand what good cinema is; a movie that is good can grip you, no matter the length of its silver screen, because the frame is not what we are watching. We are watching the movie.
And, snowed in at home, on my twenty two inch TV, with a cigar on my desk, I watched The Holdovers.
And it was decent.
I
The Holdovers is a movie that is improperly labeled. Is it really a comedic drama? Of course--but it is a movie that sticks out like a sore thumb because it has one thing most movies lack; integrity. It is the big secret of all art, no matter what the art critics say, that every cultural artifact is born in the milieu of popular culture. From Juvenal to Shakespeare to Airplane!, all great cultural artifacts were made for an audience, whatever their purpose. Romeo and Juliet seeks to pull the same heart strings that The Notebook hamfistedly tears at. What makes any work of art a great cultural artifact, with the sort of timelessness all art invariably strives for, is that it has the integrity to be mixed in with the acidic pabulum and survive. A movie from the 'Marvel Cinematic Universe' always dissolves because it cares more about quips and demographic statistics than it has ever cared about something like the human soul--but, Disney is a soulless corporation, so what did you expect?
With the Golden Globes intoxicating film enthusiast and consumerist Visigoths alike, The Holdovers has been getting its day in the sun. Rightly, Paul Giamatti won best actor in a comedy or musical for his performance. Eventually I suspect, like all artifacts that make their way into the approving eye of the audience, it will become a target of the fickle appetite of the modern moviegoer that is always in search of 'entertainment', while it will be sneered at by those who pretend to be 'theorists'--socialist or conservative or otherwise. Someone will, if they have not already, scrawl some complaint about it. And, with its integrity, The Holdovers will shrug it off.
What makes me so sure? To me, The Holdovers is improperly labeled because it truly is not a generic, trope-taped-together piece of entertainment. It is not meant to fit the labels our shallow culture has come to love so much. While its technical aspects are superb in their own right, it is not a 'technically brilliant' movie. It is a movie that possesses culture; it is a movie that may entertain or illuminate en passant, but its aims are those of the highest form of cinema, which is the aim to elevate the audience. The movie that elevates functions in the same way that Jean Paul Sartre once said novels did; it is a mirror, and through its fictions, it invites the viewer to jump into the mirror.
The Holdovers is that mirror, and what does the viewer see when they look into that mirror? They see a movie that tells us that culture is where history meets the present, where the body meets the mind, and where the human condition meets the world.
And it tells us, with subtle artistry, that the conditions for this meeting place--for culture--is decency.
II
I felt nothing but sympathy—and agreement—with Paul Hunham, the classics high school teacher played by Paul Giamatti, when he uttered his first words in the movie: 'Philistines. Lazy, vulgar, rancid little Philistines.' I have, on many occasions, uttered this myself--usually with a few extra expletives and other adjectives thrown in. How many of us, looking at our screens (much like Hunham looking at hand written essays) have not thought this of the world? It is quite true that people fit that label--if Twitter is not enough proof for you, watch prime-time comedy like Modern Family or read the articles in Jacobin.
Hunham is quite the character; he quotes Democritus, Cicero, and talks about how the word 'punitive' is derived from the way the Romans starved the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars. He reminded me much of Professor Charles W. Kingsfield Jr. in the 1973 movie The Paper Chase; tweed suits, speaks Latin and Greek, and smokes a pipe as he mercilessly grades students by the highest standards--standards for which they fail to reach. He speaks in an intellectual, mordant way and states ideas that (while I agree with them) seem out of fashion, intellectually, like saying that 'there's nothing new in human experience'. As a character, he is the antithesis to the sort of popular culture Americans love to drown in.
Hunham is forced to stay at the school for Christmas break because, as he says, he is being punished; uncompromising as he is, he refused to give the son of a Senator good grades merely because that child's father asked. And therefore, having pissed off a Senator who was searching for a place to store their son and save them from the Vietnam War they caused, Hunham is asked to watch the kids who cannot go home for the holidays. I must say, unlike most of the characters in the movie, this is something I can respect; as he says later, he refuses to 'sacrifice integrity on the altar of their entitlement'.
His time 'babysitting', as he calls it, becomes the kind of adventure that we all wish to have at some point: interesting but not fantastical, challenging but not hostile, enlightening but not cliche. Upon meeting Angus Tully and Mary Lamb, Hunham is put into a position where he gets to experience the integrity that his cultured view advocates; a view that, having been merely learned from books, is changed. What Hunham learns, whether from the empathy he learns for Tully, the respect he gains for Lamb, or the courage he finds to stand up for Tully in the face of his very institution, is that the integrity of culture is not there for its own sake; it is there to protect the chance people have to become learn decency.
This decency finds its voice in Mary Lamb, a cafeteria worker played marvelously by Da'Vine Joy Randolph. When the moviegoer meets her, she has just lost her son, Curtis Lamb, in the Vietnam War. She tells Hunham that her boy joined the military for its GI Bill benefits; he wanted to go to college. And it is her presence, her voice, and often her interventions that teach Hunham and Tully the decency neither is able to grasp at first. When Hunham goes on a diatribe about how he hoped Tully would go away, she is the one who reprimands him; she tells him that Tully feels abandoned, putting Tully’s rudeness before that scene into a different light. Mary Lamb asks us to see, even in the face of the 'rancid and lazy' philistinism we see all too often from people, that this must be met with decency. She never sugarcoats anything (as when she tells Hunham that her son hated him as a teacher), but with such truth, she asks us to respond with empathy.
This decency is not, however, moralistic; one can see this in the way when, having gone to a nice restaurant called 'The Chateau', Tully is refused a cherries jubilee because it has alcohol in it, since he is younger than age eighteen. Mary orders the ingredients for it, minus the alcohol, and they make it themselves in the parking lot (with an added, correct, 'bitch' to the waitress for being a tight ass) using a match, some Jim Beam, and ice cream. This scene is one of the most inspired and beautiful scenes in the movie, because it reveals what decency ought to be. One also sees this in the motif of 'entre nous' that is said, at several points, by both Hunham and Tully; decency is the basis for the kind of intimate secret that makes all relationships possible. The puritan never believes in privacy, but there is no such thing as decency without it; and this is what culture protects.
Decency is not a puritanical crusade against our vices, or some medicated denial of them as we often do now. In other words, it does not deny one's experiences; in life, all we have are experiences, be it cherries jubilee or heart break or the loss of a child. Experience, like the human condition, is neither good nor bad, it simply is. The point of decency, and the integrity culture uses to protect this, is to allow for the experience and help us learn from it.
This decency is what Hunham eventually sacrifices his job for; the decency to live a life of experiences and being allowed to learn from it, rather than being demanded to reform.
III
When the movie was over, and I hit pause on the stream, my stogie was at a stub, having not survived the whole two hours and thirteen minutes of the movie. I discarded to the silver grave of my ashtray. My cup, beginning the night filled with Crown Royal, was long since empty. So ensorcelled by the movie as I was, I never considered refilling or relighting these things. I could not even imagine writing this review, because the movie was such an experience that to attempt to give my thoughts expression felt sacrilegious. If asked to describe the movie, to tell someone what it is and if they ought to see it, I still will skip describing it and merely say go see it yourself.
I cannot do the experience itself justice, and neither can the size of the screen, the popcorn you buy, the leather seats you lounge in, or the people you brush arms with. This movie is one that walks the line between the sublime and reverie; it must be experienced, and I can only guarantee that the experience will transcend whichever medium you decide to use.
I end this review by turning to you, dear reader, and breaking the fourth wall: you can tell, as I can, that I have told you that this movie is about decency, but I have seemingly struggled to put that term into words. I lack the brazen obliviousness that allows theorists to take a word and, with reckless abandon, cut it up into a whittled 'concept' that can be examined--I prefer to cut up concepts and whittle them to their humanity, which is the opposite process. And so I have struggled to define the word, but I hope I have conveyed the experience.
But, whether I have or have not, I leave you with a quote from Arthur Schopenhauer, taken from his Parerga and Paralipomena because, to me, it expresses with a metaphor what I mean to say about humanity, decency, and culture:
"In a field of ripening corn I came to a place which had been trampled down by some ruthless foot; and as I glanced amongst the countless stalks, every one of them alike, standing there so erect and bearing the full weight of the ear, I saw a multitude of different flowers, red and blue and violet. How pretty they looked as they grew there so naturally with their little foliage! But, thought I, they are quite useless; they bear no fruit; they are mere weeds, suffered to remain only because there is no getting rid of them. And yet, but for these flowers, there would be nothing to charm the eye in that wilderness of stalks. They are emblematic of poetry and art, which, in civic life—so severe, but still useful and not without its fruit—play the same part as flowers in the corn."
Decency, by way of culture, is the flowers in the corn. And so is The Holdovers.