Saltburn (2023)

Type of movie: Uncanny drama where lots of weird stuff goes down for reasons not always clear.

She also wrote: Promising Young Woman, .

Trigger warning: Bathtub drains. Just… bathtub drains.

Social classes are warring (and doing weird sex stuff) in Saltburn, in which a scholarshipped Oxford undergraduate named Oliver summers at the country estate of his aristocratic friend Felix, whose family is aristocratic enough to employ two footmen, a butler and (judging from the corners on the hedge maze) at least one exhausted gardener. Oliver spends the first half the film being uncanny and well-acted by Barry Keoghan, at which midpoint the tension is spiking on what, particularly, his motive is. Protagonists without motivations can rot whole projects from the inside, but our Oliver has walked the line: Is he in love with Felix or not? Is he who he says he is? What’s up with his family? What does he want out of life? All these questions are asked without really being asked, in that gut-roiling, real-lifey way that only the best cinema achieves.

Around now it becomes imperative that Oliver really gain a purpose, and act two proceeds to feed us one by releasing some of the sexual tension. We’re primed to see Oliver and Felix as potential lovers, so naturally the working class visitor starts elsewhere (following a suspiciously gift-wrapped line about so-and-so being a sex maniac; oh! there she is in the backyard, asking for it, apparently) and right when this lust-love settles into being the point of the movie--even down to the Big Falling Out and the subsequent dastardly deed you might have sensed was coming--all that lovely tension is abandoned in an overclear ending that attempts, rather abruptly, to turn this uncanny and not-at-all likeable figure into an eat-the-rich underclass champion that, at his core, he is not.

Was all that sex stuff meant only to cast a pall of weirdness over him? That seems iffy in these sex-positive times, but the cut-and-dryness of his final motive (elided here for the sake of avoiding spoilers) seems to insist on yes. The Oliver they leave us with is, potentially, the worst possible one: in his motive he is disappointingly generic, while in his character he is a moral outlier (read: one twisted mofo) rather than somebody psychologically empowered to hunt the aristocracy. 

The Holdovers (2023)

Type of movie: Feel-good drama that could have sliced its way into the gruesomes of human nature but chooses to stay pleasant.

So… naïve? Like anything “feel-good,” that is the risk, I suppose.

Three reasons to watch: Great details in the script; not a depressing experience; Paul Giamatti’s soothing voice.

When Paul Hunham, curmudgeonly teacher-but-should-have-been-a-professor at a New England boarding school, explains that the reason he smells like fish is because he can’t break down trimethylaminuria, it suddenly hits you that his body language throughout the film has, the whole time, afforded the presence of this odour and it’s, like, but for the scent itself you’re basically smelling Paul Giamatti through the TV.

The man is a wonderful actor, but the point is that this case of BO is the kind of detail that saves The Holdovers, whose obvious risk--as a movie where an at-odds teacher and student war enough to eventually change one another’s perceptions of life and love (or whatever)--is the stench of Hallmark Channel cheese. It doesn’t always keep clean of that smell, the way Saltburn unfailingly does, with some plotlines following the theme (oh no, this boy needs a father figure but--hang on a second--his teacher is about the right age!) instead of the generally preferred inverse; but it’s hard to be mad about that, thanks to how the script keeps itself afloat on the very immediate level of good word choices.

I mean: “Hardy, I have known you since you were a boy, so I think I have the requisite experience and insight to aver that you are and always have been penis cancer in human form.” Why is it so easy to believe that there really was an intellectually frustrated fishy-smelling New England man in 1970 who told his boss that?