The Holdovers (NC16)
133 minutes, opens on Jan 11 exclusively at The Projector
4 stars
The story: American actor Paul Giamatti, in a career-best performance under his Sideways (2004) director Alexander Payne, plays a grinchy professor tasked with staying on at a New England boarding school over Christmas to mind a bright but troublesome student (Dominic Sessa).
Of course the conflicting duo of The Holdovers will find kinship after a string of comic misadventures.
But what an emotionally rewarding journey towards the obvious, watching Giamatti’s sweaty wall-eyed misanthrope Paul Hunham, the academy’s most hated teacher, spark off against Sessa as the angry and hurting teen smart-a** Angus Tully, whose mother has stranded him for the winter holidays to honeymoon with her new husband.
Also on the snow-blanketed campus is Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb, the black cafeteria cook who is mourning her son killed in the Vietnam War.
The story is set in 1970 and styled like a film from that era, complete with zooms and dissolves. In spirit, too, it is a throwback to the 1970s cinema of Bob Rafelson (Five Easy Pieces, 1970) and Hal Ashby (The Last Detail, 1973), to the sort of scrappy character-driven dramedies that have established American film-maker Payne as a critics’ darling through eight features spanning Election (1999), The Descendants (2011) and Nebraska (2013).
His latest was one of the best reviewed releases of 2023, particularly for Hunham’s scabrous wit and the outstanding performers. Sessa, raw and rangy, is a major discovery in his screen debut, while Randolph underplays Mary’s grief with weary stoicism.
Giamatti and Randolph earned Golden Globes earlier this week, for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy and Best Supporting Actress respectively.
The trio are outcasts, wounded and alone. The bittersweet heartwarmer is perfectly calibrated between the funny and the forlorn as it melds their varying shades of sadness into a fable about companionship.
Hot take: You will laugh and weep with the three broken souls, and come to love them.
Abang Adik (PG13)
115 minutes, opens on Jan 11
3 stars
The story: The two characters of the title, which translates to “elder brother younger sibling”, are undocumented Chinese-Malaysian orphans in present-day Malaysia. Their bond is tested by a violent act that forces them to go on the run.
The bleak neo-realist drama Abang Adik has been putting Malaysian cinema on the map since it began its year-long film festival tour.
The directing debut of Jin Ong has also been a commercial success, notably in Taiwan, where Taiwanese star Wu Kang-ren won the Golden Horse Award for his lead performance of Abang opposite Malaysian Jack Tan as the younger Adik.
The brothers have no legal papers, hence no rights. Exploitation and persecution, having to hide from the authorities, are their daily injustices.
Abang, a gentle deaf-mute, scrapes by on menial jobs at Kuala Lumpur’s Pasar Pudu wet market, but rage-filled Adik will not resign himself to his circumstances and makes fast money from human trafficking.
His heedlessness leads them to tragedy.
The melodramatic touches and uneven pacing are imperfections common among first-time film-makers, and they are especially easy to forgive for such a heart-on-its-sleeve socially conscious work.
Ong’s tearjerker tells the untold story of the city’s marginalised lives: the stateless citizens, migrant labourers, refugees and transgender prostitutes such as Kakak Money (Tan Kim Wang), who fostered Abang and Adik and created for them a loving family in the slums.
Abang in a late impassioned scene expresses their collective despair: The system has completely failed them.
Most touchingly, he strives through it all to remain an example for Adik to be “a good person”.
Hot take: This social issues docudrama with its compelling actors gives humanity and a voice to the invisible people living in the shadows of a gleaming metropolis.
