2024-03-01 16:29:44
The prestigious Barton Academy in the American region of New England seems as if it is still anchored in the traditions of the 19th century. Also, one of the heroes of the film Winter Vacation, the frowning morous, who teaches the history of antiquity here, looks like a piece of ancient inventory. But it’s the 1970s, and director Alexander Payne has shot a film against snowy backdrops that wants to be a new Christmas classic.
In his most successful films Bokovka or Nebraska, Payne dealt with human imperfection or smallness and how the heroes deal with it.
When he attempted a satire in his most recent film Downsizing, which takes this key theme literally within a sci-fi premise, it turned out ingloriously. The creator is completely lost in the twists and turns of his variation on Gulliver’s Travels. He longed to name so many social evils that he did not fully come up with a single one. On the contrary, in the end he got totally lost and came close to the absolute bottom of his work, the unbearable comedy My Children from 2011.
Winter vacation, which starts showing in Czech cinemas this Thursday, is certainly a return to form for Payne. As in Bokovka, it focuses on one place and a couple of heroes, again featuring Paul Giamatti. He plays Professor Hunham, whose students hate him. The old bachelor and eternal pedant with his mustache and bulging eyes resembles a badger who does not leave his slightly musty burrow.
When all the students at Barton Academy, a fictional all-boys boarding school near Boston, leave for Christmas break, Hunham is the only one left on campus. And just the one he himself describes with the words “wasp in the ass”. Some classmates would probably agree with that. Both of them are helped to survive in a residence reminiscent of an abandoned, slightly deserted palace by a corpulent cook who is grieving the death of her son, who is not even twenty years old.
It’s not a scheme we’ve ever seen. Payne, however, works moderately with the tension of the completely non-celebratory space and its few inhabitants, who have to survive here rather than – like everyone, including their loved ones – unwrapping presents under a decorated tree.
Paul Giamatti plays Hunham, a pedantic professor of ancient history. | Photo: Seacia Pavao
It is a microcosm in which it is difficult to breathe, because the professor intends to follow all the rules, as if the lessons were still going on. At the same time, it gradually becomes clear that neither he nor his ward are what they seem at first glance.
Not only the cook is grieving. Both protagonists also have wounds in their hearts from the past or the recent past and do not know how to heal them.
Payne has found the right tone for a functional, slightly melancholic comedy that does not rely on any big thrills or plot surprises. Rather, he cuts every potentially plot-forming scene in the middle and just patiently wraps the characters in additional layers. And he continues to profile himself as the author of bitter comedies that can impress both audiences and critics.
This position suits the creator the most. Payne’s greatest asset is the actor’s ability to tame. He was able to force even the most expressive ones into a muted speech.
He did so with Jack Nicholson in the prickly film About Schmidt, and he also notably led Bruce Dern as another specific senior in black and white Nebraska, where he admittedly worked with the poetics of Miloš Forman’s early films.
Dominic Sessa as Angus, Paul Giamatti as Hunham and Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary. | Photo: Seacia Pavao
Fifty-six-year-old Paul Giamatti, with a distinctive, unmistakable face, now expands this pantheon of quirky elderly gentlemen who must come to terms with the world and themselves. And his transformation from a morose quoting Greek and Roman classics into something like a living, even perhaps for a second warm human being is remarkable.
This picture has the potential to settle into the Christmas TV schedule one day. Winter Vacation is not a snow-covered romance or a film that copes with the atmosphere of the biggest holidays of the year with sharp or sarcastic humor. Christmas here takes the form of a fancy Christmas tree from a sale, which in the end is not the case at all. It’s a deliberately gray film, with precisely dosed pinches of hope.
Winter Break has a bit of the outsider empathy we know from titles like John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club. The ability to find light, touching and understated notes can in turn bring to mind Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude.
Alexander Payne has always seemed more like a filmmaker who looks up to his role models and more or less successfully approximates their qualities, rather than a completely independent auteur. After all, he managed to step into complete distaste in the title My Children, where George Clooney in a Hawaiian shirt embodied the emptiness of the American auteur film, which instead of reflecting on serious topics, only helplessly closes its eyes to them.
But the winter holidays are the location that best suits the director. A small, human picture was created, without excessive ambitions, but with an effort to portray as truthfully as possible a few days that move the lives of the protagonists.
The scheme is perhaps all too familiar, but Alexander Payne imbued it with a genuineness that allows the story to breathe life until the end – despite the surrounding floods of snow, which metaphorically and literally suffocate everyone.
Film
Winter holidays
Directed by: Alexander Payne
CinemArt, Czech premiere on February 22.