Movie: "The Holdovers"...Plus a Book Review

 "The Holdovers"

I had been wanting to see this one ever since I saw a trailer for it late last summer.  The movie stars Paul Giamatti and is directed by Alexander Payne, the same team that gave us the terrific "Sideways" back in 2004.  The movie was released in November to critical acclaim and made just about every Ten Best list for 2023.  However, it disappeared from theaters here in Pittsburgh as quickly as it appeared.  It became available on streaming almost immediately, and last night we watched it, and it is terrific.

Giamatti plays Paul  Hunham, a misanthropic history teacher specializing in "ancient civilizations" at  an exclusive boys boarding school somewhere in New England.  The Christmas holiday break is approaching and all of the boys are preparing to depart for the holiday.  For reasons I won't explain, but become clear as the movie unfolds, one boy, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), needs to be left behind, or held over, at the school for the break.  By the luck of the draw, Hunham is the lone faculty member who will be held over to keep track of Angus and the school.  Also held over is the school's chief cook, Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph).  She is an African American single mother who took a job at the school many years before so her son could get a good education.

Nobody at the school - faculty, students, staff, nobody - likes Hunham, and Angus, while a good student, has many issues of his own, including family ones.  The two predictably clash, but as the holiday goes on, the three of them, Paul, Angus, and Mary form a bond of sorts and come to learn a lot about each other and of life.

Giamatti, unsurprisingly, is terrific in the roll, as is Randolph (she also played the homicide cop in "Only Murdrs in the Building), but the real star just might be 21 year old Sessa, a Carnegie Mellon alumnus in his first acting role.  The movie is also a treat to look at, as are all of Payne's movies.  The movie takes place in 1970, and Payne nails the details of that point in time perfectly.

Four Stars from The Grandstander.

"The Breakers" by Marcia Muller

Marcia Muller published her first novel featuring San Francisco private eye Sharon McCone in 1977, and she has written thirty-four McCone novels since and the thirty-fifth one will be published this year.   There was a time when I read every one of them, but my interest in the series waned, and I probably haven't read one since sometime in the '90s.  However, this one caught my eye sitting on a shelf at the library, so I checked it out and became reacquainted with Sharon McCone.

The story finds Sharon trying to locate a young woman, the daughter of a friend, who has gone missing.  It takes place in a rundown part of  the city and centers upon a seedy hotel/apartment building called The Breakers that the missing woman is in the process of rehabbing.   In the process of her investigation, she finds that there just may be a connection to the woman's disappearance and a serial killer known as "The Carver", who has been dormant for seven years.  Or has he?

The story is standard detective novel fare, and it does hold one's interest.  However, and I remember this when I was a regular reader, we become involved in the personal life of McCone as a human being with a full, albeit complicated personal life, just like all of us.  A lot has happened to Sharon since I left her sometime in the 1990's, and a major life event occurs in this one as well.  Muller has done an excellent job of telling the life story of her character.

Two and One-half Stars from The Grandstander.