A Year at the Movies: November, THE HOLDOVERS

Actors, Faces, and the Beats of Cliché

Paul Giamatti may yet prove to have one of the great faces in Hollywood history. When he is long dead, and they speak of character actors in our era the way we speak of, say, Fatty Arbunkle or James Cagney, he will face no competition. Paul Giamatti’s face can carry an entire film upon the strange twists of its eyebrow alone. We see this in The Holdovers.

That is by no means to imply The Holdovers is otherwise a “bad” film; it is excellent. The cast, director, and cinematographer each carry their own weight. Each of his co-stars is a talent in their right, especially DaVine Joy Randolph’s portrayal of a grieving war mother. But it is Giamatti who truly makes the magic happen. He manages to give otherwise silly lines an emotional weight and resonance they do not truly deserve. In Giamatti’s hands, the pathetic display as his character comically fails to spin a convincing lie to a more successful Harvard classmate moves from the silly to the tragicomic, and then into the outright tragic.

The exchange, occurring toward the film’s end, is a perfect example of its pathos. We have already seen Giamatti’s character in action. He is an inversion (possibly deliberate) of Robin William’s role in Dead Poets Society. He is not affable, or progressive, but stodgy and mean—he seems most vindicated when failing, degrading, or otherwise tormenting his students. Yet we cannot help but love him. Giamatti’s hero is a lost soul, burned by the unfairness of the elite school system which has claimed his life, and his bitterness and cruelty is a mangling of the basic care-instinct which motivates all good teachers. He has seen too many legacies and rich young pricks be easily passed along and afforded an easy life; he reacts with cruelty to try and make them understand a small amount of the difficulty that others have.

If all this story—the mean teacher who warms up when a young, ill-behaved but good-hearted misfit breaks through his shell. Cliché as all hell, of course, in the vein of the seventies movies Alexander Payne has built a career off of imitating. The joy of the movie is not in the thrills or surprises, nor is it in some hidden element that the astute viewer can discover. No such hidden element exists. The joy of the movie is in its repetition of themes and images we have seen before. In the repetition of cliches, the movie does not require the viewer to leap and understand new material, but instead is able to work upon a pre-generated emotional response. In short: the plot works because we have seen its story beats before, and when we see them here, we have an emotional reaction not only to this instance but to the million times we have seen cliches before.

The joy of this movie is in the repetition of a plot we already know. We know how the movie will end, or at least we have a vague idea, but that doesn’t cheapen the experience—if anything, it gives the actors more room to work. When the audience can rely upon the beats of a well-known story, skilled actors can, in fact must, work to ground the film. If they do not, the whole thing will collapse into flatness. But with skill like the actors of The Holdovers bring, and especially a face like Paul Giamatti’s, cliché ceases to be cliché and becomes instead a stylized version of life. We know how the move ends, yes, but when the ending arrives we feel its weight all the same. When Giamatti’s character rides off into the snowy New England afternoon, it is not cliché—but an old friend. We smile to see him go.