Also worth seeing: ‘Priscilla,’ Meg Ryan’s comeback in ‘What Happens Later.’
A troubled student , a grumpy teacher and a grieving mom wind up stuck together during Christmas break in “The Holdovers.”This week we check out a contender for that title, Alexander Payne’s seasonally appropriate — for December — “The Holdovers.” We also take a look at Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla” and the inspirational school drama “Radical.”
The biggest disappointment, though, arrives from Netflix with “All the Light We Cannot See,” based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and bearing one atrocious accent.Take that perennial Christmas chestnut you watch time and time again. Sprinkle in elements of “Dead Poets Society.” Then let someone like the late filmmaker Hal Ashby, who graced us with “Harold and Maude,” baste it and bake it.
That somewhat conveys what you have with Alexander Payne’s holiday-themed treat, a droll but fragile character study about three loners stuck together in 1970 at a snowy New England prep school during what’s allegedly the “most wonderful time of the year.” Payne has always specialized in giving us multi-dimensional, quirky individuals, characters who you sometimes like and sometimes simply can’t stand. In essence, they’re flawed and act an awful lot like you and me. That’s true of the threesome that screenwriter David Hemingson crafts with such genuine and delicate care.
For that reason and others “The Holdovers” is way tastier than your average holiday movie leftovers. Payne brings to the vast tableau of Christmas films a departure — a movie about three lonely people having a dickens of a time connecting and dealing with their feelings until they get thrown together to find comfort and joy from each other.
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