Film Review Double Feature: "The Holdovers" and "Priscilla"

Fall 2023 has been a good year for two of Hollywood's most noted and respected directors.

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I recently signed up for the Regal Unlimited Plan, and so I’ve decided to restart my moviegoing commitment. Fortunately for me, this is a really fantastic time at the cineplex, and I had the joy of seeing two strong outings, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers and Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla. I very much enjoyed both of these, so I figured I’d share my love of these films with you, my dear readers. 

Let’s start with The Holdovers. Paul Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a classics teacher at the prestigious Barton Academy, a boarding school for boys. Thanks to the manipulations of one of his colleagues, he gets stranded keeping an eye on a number of students, one of whom is the troubled but oddly charismatic Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), who is contending with a broken family and a father’s mental illness. The final part of their trio is Da'Vine Joy Randolph’s Mary Lamb, the head cook at Barton who has recently lost her son. As the film unfolds, they all forge a rather extraordinary friendship, first on the snowbound campus and then, later, in Boston. 

The Holdovers is one of those films which manages to strike the perfect balance between its humorous and its comedic elements. While much of this can be attributed to Paul Giamatti’s undeniable skill as an actor (if he doesn’t get an Oscar nomination or a win for this film, there is no justice in the universe), some of it can also be attributed to newcomer Dominic Sessa. Beneath all of Angus’s posturing, it’s clear that there is a deep well of anger, hurt, and resentment, particularly toward his mother, who divorced his father after the latter developed a debilitating mental illness before remarrying. There’s a nervous energy to Sessa’s performance that anchors his story, and it’s extraordinary to watch this star-in-the-making. 

Giamatti, meanwhile, gives one of his very best performances. At first he is the epitome of a blustering and egomaniacal classics professor, the type of person who takes as much pleasure reading Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations as he does flunking his reprobate students. As the film goes on, however, he starts to thaw out a bit in Angus’ presence, revealing a richer and far more sympathetic man beneath all of the bluster. It’s to Giamatti’s credit that he gives us a strangely moving portrait of a teacher whose life has been a series of debilitating disappointments, starting from the moment he was forced to leave Harvard after hitting his roommate with his car (to be fair, the guy had it coming, having stolen Hunham’s work and then accusing him of the theft). Since then he has had to labor on at his old alma mater, where he becomes so entrenched and largely dismissed by everyone that he holds on far past the point where he probably should have left for greener pastures. 

And then there’s Randolph’s Mary. Like Hunham and Angus, she has her own griefs and disappointments, and they weigh heavily on her. Her son, a graduate of Barton, has been killed in Vietnam, and she struggles with her grief. Though Randolph has sharp comedic timing, she also digs deep to give us a moving and haunting portrait of a mourning mother, someone who has lost both her son and the young man’s father. Fortunately she has her own moments of joy, and there’s a particularly beautiful scene in which we see her laughing and reminiscing with her sister in Boston, a welcome respite from her sadness. 

Though the three holdovers gradually come to love and appreciate one another and manage to grab some Christmas joy for themselves, things go sideways when Angus decides to visit his father. It’s a scene both heartbreaking and heartwarming, since it gives us more valuable insight into why Angus is so troubled. Unfortunately, it also has some unintended consequences, and Hunham ultimately has to decide whether to throw Angus under the bus or fall on his own sword to protect his student from the wrath of the administration. He chooses the latter, and the two share one last moment of bonding before Hunham departs for an uncertain future. 

Like the best dramedies, The Holdovers denies us the satisfying emotional closure of a happy ending. Though Hunham manages to get one last dig in at his posturing and foolish boss, there’s no denying he’s gotten the raw end of the deal: banished from the school he’s called home for most of his life, all of his belongings packed into a diminutive U-Haul trailer. At the same time, though, he’s also gained quite a lot, too, having finally allowed some of his walls to come tumbling down in the face of Angus’s insouciance and Mary’s generous warmth. 

The Holdovers feels like a movie from a different era, one both more innocent and more jaded than our own. For that reason, it’s destined, I think, to become a true holiday classic, or at least it deserves to. And, it probably goes without saying, I loved all of the allusions to classical antiquity, and the film is also a testament to the once-vaunted place the ancient world had in secondary instruction. Though the film is soon to be released on digital, I think it more than rewards seeing it on the big screen. 

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Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla is, like many of the director’s other films, concerned with a young woman caught up in a life of privilege that ultimately becomes more and more stultifying. When the film begins, Priscilla is a teenager living in Germany with her parents, but a chance encounter leads to her attending a party held by Elvis himself. After a nervous (and deeply problematic) courtship, she moves in with Elvis, though he is careful not to take things too far–or to officially start dating her–until she has come of age. Elvis gives Priscilla everything she could want, at least at first.  

Very quickly, however, life at Graceland begins to turn sour as Elvis’ burgeoning film career calls him away from their home and off to California. While he gets to live the high life–and gets to have rumored affairs with people like Ann-Margaret–Priscilla gets to sit around Graceland keeping the homefires burning (as Elvis euphemistically put it). There’s more than a little bit of the DNA of Marie Antoinette in this film, since Priscilla, like her 18th century predecessor, on paper seems to have the kind of life anyone would envy, but all the opulence in the world isn’t enough to make up for the physical and emotional absence of the man she loves.

Things aren’t much better when Elvis is home, however. Jacob Elordi endows the King of Rock and Roll with a disarming charisma, but one always gets the sense that there is a darkness lurking just beneath, just waiting to come roaring to the surface. His moments of explosive rage are terrifying to behold, and in one notable instance he even hurls a chair across the room, nearly hitting Priscilla. Of course, like all abusive and manipulative people, he always rushes to reassure her that he wasn’t lashing out at her, that he would never harm her. 

Even more troubling is the extent to which he works to control every aspect of her life, up to and including her clothing choices, micromanaging her appearance and subtly (and not-so-subtly) coercing her into doing what he wants her to do at all times. And he does all of this while resolutely denying Priscilla the physical and sexual intimacy she desperately craves, even after she has passed the age of consent. It’s a bit unclear whether he withholds out of a genuine discomfort with his own body or whether this is just another way of exerting his control over her, but either way it becomes yet another aspect of her life that remains unfulfilled. 

Priscilla is filled with moments in which the title character is isolated in the frame, surrounded by all the gilded trappings of Graceland but almost no human company. There’s even a very Sirkian moment in which she gazes out of a mirror, trapped in a world she can’t escape and which offers her very little in terms of stimulation or activity. She’s not even allowed to spend too much time in the front yard, despite the fact that she has a dog and has almost nothing else to occupy her time. She is ultimately just another object in Elvis’ collection, a means of providing the emotional fulfillment he lacks elsewhere in his life.

The film ends with Priscilla finally and definitively declaring that she wants nothing more to do with Elvis, leaving both him and Graceland behind to begin a new life on her own. The final shots of the film are of her driving away from the home that has become a prison, a scene evocative of both Marie Antoinette and Pablo Larraín’s Spencer. Elvis, meanwhile, is left to his own inevitable decline and death. 

Throughout the film, Cailee Spaeny gives a subdued but remarkably effective performance as the title character, ably capturing her shift from adolescence to adulthood. It’s really quite remarkable the extent to which she is able to capture Priscilla at various stages in her life, to such an extent that we believe that we are bearing witness to a woman truly coming into her own. 

Ultimately Priscilla, unlike The Holdovers, isn’t the type of film that invites you to fall in love with it. Instead it seems determined to keep us at arm’s length, asking us to be simple observers of this strange and simultaneously eventful/boring life. Like Sirk, Coppola is a filmmaker with a keen eye and an ability to make mise-en-scene convey just as much, if not more, than her actors. And, like Sirk, she is a master at showing the darkness and despair that often lurks beneath the American dream.