I’ve Seen This 2023 Drama Five Times, and It Keeps Getting Better

In Slate’s annual Movie Club, film critic Dana Stevens emails with fellow critics—for 2023, Bilge Ebiri, Esther Zuckerman, and Mark Harris—about the year in cinema. Read the first entry here.

Well hello again,

Dana, your bringing up the word hate as a potentially problematic word for film criticism aligns fortuitously with the current discourse over 10-worst lists. Such lists have been a part of mainstream film criticism since time immemorial. Siskel and Ebert used to devote a whole episode to their stinkers of the year. (I still remember their absolute evisceration of David Lynch’s Dune.) The 10-worst list could also be used creatively; Peter Travers of Rolling Stone once named Titanic both the best film of 1997 and the worst film of 1997, which probably reflected many people’s opinions of Titanic at the time. (For the record, I think Titanic is one of the greatest movies ever made.)

But in recent years, there’s been a backlash to such lists, predicated on the idea that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all. This ties into the increasingly chummy relationship a lot of us think we have with filmmakers who are themselves online. Which then scales up to a general tendency to feel protective of filmmakers’ feelings, whether we’ve interacted with them or not. This recent round of extremely online screaming seems to have been prompted by Variety including Asteroid City on a list of the worst films of the year. Now, I think Asteroid City is a near masterpiece; it’s in my Top 10. And Wes Anderson isn’t on Twitter; I suspect he doesn’t give a shit that Variety didn’t like his movie.

But I also think it’s delightful that Variety put Asteroid City on its 10-worst list! That’s wrong as hell, but so what? If you’re going to take risks, or be particular, or put yourself out there in any real way as an artist—which Wes Anderson certainly does—you deserve to have the potential to fall on your face. It’s your right as an artist to risk failure; otherwise, cinema is just one big padded cell where nobody can hurt themselves. Frankly, I miss doing 10-worst lists. I see a lot of total garbage in any given year that I don’t get to write about. Not because I have hate in my heart, but because it forces me to articulate why I genuinely despised these films. And if some filmmakers’ feelings are hurt as a result, then so be it. Heartbreak builds character. Or so people have been telling me for the past 40 years.

I loved Poor Things when I saw it at its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, where Yorgos Lanthimos was, of course, the only “name” in attendance, due to the then-ongoing WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes. The film won the Golden Lion there, which seemed like a foregone conclusion as soon as it screened for the press; some even said at the time that it was an immediate Best Picture front-runner, which, well, I don’t know about that. (It is truly amazing that big stars line up to work with the guy who made Dogtooth, and that he has managed to achieve all this without scaling back the weirdness of his films one bit.) While I’m sure I’ll love Poor Things all over again if/when I see it again, it hasn’t necessarily stuck with me the way other Lanthimos efforts have, and the way several other titles I saw at Venice did.

Perhaps that has to do with the fact that Poor Things is the rare Lanthimos picture that allows something resembling optimism and hope to creep in. All his films are about control and degradation. In The Lobster, both the futuristic society of last-ditch marriage-seekers and the unrepentantly single resistance fighters opposing them have built communities around humiliation and punishment. And let’s not even start with the competing debasements of The Favourite. For Yorgos Lanthimos, the world is one great shame machine.

Poor Things has enough of those elements to mark itself as a Lanthimos film, but here he gives us a more hopeful narrative trajectory. He shows the debased gaining power and reclaiming their identities. Bella is broken in all sorts of horrible ways, but her supposed ignorance and shamelessness—thanks to the Frankensteinian reset that her body and her brain have undergone—eventually fuel her ability to transcend society’s corrupt mores and rituals. That’s a beautiful thing, but it’s also possible the ostensibly happy (albeit twisted) ending is what kept Poor Things from clawing at my brain the way previous Lanthimos films have. Maybe—just maybe—the reason why some people find the ending less successful than the rest of the movie is because, on some deep level, Lanthimos’ heart isn’t quite in it. He’s not a hopeful filmmaker. Or maybe we’re all just bad people.

Speaking of humiliation, Esther asked which filmmaker we would most want to make a movie of our life. The answer for me is easy: Alexander Payne has been making movies about pathetic, middle-aged nobodies for 30 years now, so when the time comes to tell the Bilge Ebiri Story on screen, I’m calling in the experts. I do find it fascinating that none of us has uttered a peep about The Holdovers yet, even though it appears on all our lists. (It might be the only film that shows up on all four, in fact.) I have it at No. 2, just ahead of Michael Mann’s Ferrari—and everybody who knows me knows just how much I love Michael Mann and Ferrari.

I’ve seen The Holdovers five times already. Sometime around Screening 4, I sat down to see if I could catalog all of the many delightfully withering insults uttered by Paul Hunham, the fussy, principled, and embittered classics teacher played by Paul Giamatti. But I quickly realized that the other two characters, Dominic Sessa’s troubled teen Angus Tully and Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s grieving cook Mary Lamb, actually have their share of delicious put-downs as well. Indeed, this is sort of what the film is about, about the rage all these people have against the world around them—some of it justified, some of it juvenile, some of it curdled.

The Holdovers has at times been described as “cozy,” and I suppose it sort of is, with its snowy holiday setting, the soft, classic folk-rock soundtrack, and the humanity with which it treats its three protagonists. But it really is also quite a dark movie. In my end-of-year write-up, I likened it to a “warm blanket made of asbestos.” Perhaps that’s too dark, but it’s indicative of where the film leaves me. There’s no resolution at the end of the movie, if you think about it. Hunham’s still an embittered alcoholic with terrible body odor, and now he’s an unemployed college dropout too. There’s no way he’s finishing that monograph, and even if he does, nobody’s going to buy it or read it. It would take a substantial amount of good fortune for him even to turn into a variation on Paul Giamatti in Sideways. Angus has managed to stay in school, but he’ll probably get kicked out next year. He’s certainly not more docile or well-behaved, and his family still hates him. There’s a good chance he just turns into Paul Hunham. Mary has reconnected with her sister, but nothing will bring Curtis back, though maybe she among the three of them can find some happiness.

In 2023, do any of them still keep in touch? Most likely Paul Hunham, who was old enough to try and enlist in WWII, would be dead of cirrhosis by now. But if he made it, and a 98-year-old Paul ran into a 68-year-old Angus on a Boston street at Christmastime, would they recognize each other?

So, this, too, like Showing Up, is a movie whose characters have stayed in my mind. I’ve found myself thinking and wondering about Paul, Angus, and Mary as if they were real people I’ve known. That’s the magic of a film like this, and specifically of the kind of humanism Payne excels at. His films aren’t meandering or messy. They’re tight, controlled, made up of meticulously conceived little scenes and shots. But look at the way that he sets up these protagonists early on, with brief, intimate vignettes that give us a sense of who they are as people, before proceeding to bounce them off one another. This movie is a clinic in how to efficiently create lived-in characters while still giving us a sense of the world beyond. One of the things that I keep being told serial storytelling does (be it a TV show or a superhero franchise) is that it gives us characters we become obsessed with, so that we absolutely have to know what happens to them next. And I’ve certainly had TV shows that I’ve watched for that reason. But that’s just math: Yeah, spend 12 hours with a bunch of characters, and you might feel obligated to keep up with their future actions. I vastly prefer the kind of streamlined, precise characterization of an Alexander Payne movie. This gives me room to imagine, rather than to watch The Continuing Adventures of the Holdovers.

Not that I would be angry if they made a sequel. I was happy to see The Holdovers do well financially, in both limited and wide release. It’s a very audience-friendly movie. But as Sam noted, it’s not enough to give a movie a six-week window before it winds up on TV. The Holdovers was still in the Top 10 when its theatrical window ended and it went to digital. It’s hard not to feel as if someone left a lot of money on the table here.

Presumably, with its wider availability, more folks have seen it since then, and I certainly hope they have. But it also feels as if people basically stopped talking about The Holdovers as soon as it began vanishing from theater screens. (Case in point: us.) And I worry it will be forgotten in the awards crush, trapped as it is among big-swing awards juggernauts. Can you imagine if Paul Giamatti, who still inexplicably has only one Oscar nomination to his name (for Cinderella Man!), gets ignored once again?

Adversity builds character, Mr. Tully,

Bilge

Read the next entry in Movie Club: One Line From Ferrari Made Me Want to Tear a Sink From the Wall