MIKE AT THE MOVIES: Two Oscar-Aspiring Films: The Holdovers and Napoleon

The Holdovers. Photo from Focus Features.

by MIKE ORLOCK

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“They don’t make ‘em like they used to” is a movie maxim as old as – well, at least as old as the guy writing this review. But it’s especially applicable to two recent releases – both currently in theaters wearing their Oscar aspirations on their sleeves – which want you to think they’re straight out of some 70s time warp in the way they’ve been cast, made and marketed: The Holdovers (rated R, primarily for language) and Napoleon (rated R, primarily for battle carnage with a little sex thrown in).

The Holdovers is set in one of those picture-postcard private boarding schools in New England made especially memorable in Dead Poets Society. The school is named Barton Academy, and Paul Giamatti is Barton’s curmudgeonly Classics teacher, Paul Hunham, whose quick-with-a-quip acidic sense of humor has made him something of a pariah to both his students (who call him “Walleye” behind his back because of a noticeable eye deformity) and his colleagues, who consider him a duck so odd they’d just as soon avoid him. Needless to say, Mr. Keating he is not.

It’s Christmas break 1970, and Mr. Hunham has been given the unenviable task of tending to five students ranging in age from middle to high school, left behind for the holidays by their rich parents who’d rather celebrate elsewhere without them. The five unlucky lads left in Mr. Hunham’s care for two weeks of what amounts to an in-school suspension are the usual Breakfast Club mix: there’s the obnoxious rich kid, a scholarship nerd from Korea, an overtly polite goody-two shoes from Utah, a football jock angling for a last-second reprieve from his out-of-country CEO father, and the brilliant but belligerent Angus Tully (newcomer Dominic Sessa) who, through a few deft plot maneuvers, ends up being the last kid in Hunham’s charge.

Both Hunham and Tully are hard cases hiding inner angst, and it’s not giving away anything to reveal that their time together will result in each of them learning a few things about the other that will teach them something about themselves. They’re assisted in this journey of self-discovery by the maternal, Black kitchen cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph in excellent support), who accompanies them on an impromptu “field trip” to Boston that comprises the middle act of the movie, during which Hunham and Tully butt heads before meeting minds.

Director Alexander Payne has made some of the sharpest comedy-dramas of the past 20-plus years, beginning with Election and including About Schmidt, The Descendants, and Sideways, which gave Paul Giamatti his first leading-man role. He perfectly captures the look and feel of a 70s-era art house flick, from costuming to Cat Stevens needle drops on the soundtrack. 

Of course, setting a movie in 1970 is different from making a movie that looks like it came from 1970. The time-warp feel that Payne has painstakingly invested in robs The Holdovers of some of the emotional immediacy he captured so well in his other films. Still, this is a movie worth seeing, either in theaters or on Peacock, where it will eventually stream sometime in the new year.

Napoleon is something of a throwback, too, to a time when Hollywood movies were cast with actors who all spoke the King’s English, regardless of the ethnicity of the characters they were playing. That’s how we got John Wayne playing Genghis Khan and Charleton Heston playing Moses: if you were an actor, it wasn’t supposed to matter who you were playing, you played them. If you were a trained actor who’d graduated from acting school, maybe you’d deliver your lines with a hint of accent – for authenticity, you know.

Here, we get recent Best Actor Oscar-winner Joaquin Phoenix (Joker) and recent Best Actress Oscar-nominee Vanessa Kirby (Pieces of a Woman) playing, respectively, the diminutive French general who conquered Europe in the early 19th century, and the courtesan who captured his heart while he was doing it. Phoenix might have a drop of Corsican blood somewhere in his lineage, but Kirby is as English as tea and crumpets. Still, the two make as compelling a French couple as Marlon Brando and Merle Oberon did in the same roles back in 1954, with nary an accent to be heard.

Director Ridley Scott has made his share of classics (Alien, Blade Runner, Thelma & Louise, Gladiator) and clunkers (A Good Day, Robin Hood, Prometheus), and this “intimate epic,” which runs just short of three hours, falls somewhere in between. 

On the plus side, we get Napoleon’s greatest battle hits, presented with the visual sweep and power that Scott is famous for, featuring thousands of soldiers clashing in brutal combat while Napoleon looks on from his horse. The battle of Austerlitz, during which Napoleon’s forces routed the Austrian and Russian armies on a frozen lake, is as breathtaking as any action scene filmed in recent memory; and the battle at Waterloo reminded me of the late, great Stanley Kubrick’s action choreography in Spartacus, with hundreds of extras moving in synchronized geometric formations filmed from overhead. 

On the not-so-plus side, we get the tempestuous boudoir battles of Napoleon and Josephine, as the emperor attempts to conquer his wife’s womb in quest of a male heir. These encounters are played with a heated physicality bordering on comedy, especially when things – how should I put this? – climax in some of the most awkward sex scenes you’re likely to see this year.

In between battlefields and the bedroom are a few “meanwhile” scenes of elaborately dressed royals discussing political events in the capitals of Europe. It’s a large cast of mostly English character actors, and they all look great in bouffant gowns and brocade waistcoats and bicorne hats. The film doesn’t skimp on the details, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about Napoleon – or Josephine, for that matter – that we couldn’t find on a Wikipedia page.

Napoleon represents another huge investment gamble by Apple Original Films, which recently bankrolled Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. I’d recommend seeing Napoleon on the biggest screen possible for the battle scenes alone, but you will find it streaming on Apple TV+ sometime next year.

In another lifetime, Mike Orlock wrote film reviews for the Reporter/Progress newspapers in the western suburbs of Chicago. He has also taught high school English, coached basketball and authored three books of poetry. He finished his two-year term as Door County’s poet laureate in early 2023.