The Holdovers

The line between tradition and cliché narrows at Christmastime. Holiday movies are a paradox. They set the tone for what we think that Christmas ought to be, and yet the characters are almost never having the Christmas they want—and the Christmas they want is most likely a Christmas they never had. Their displacement mirrors our own. What we long for is just beyond our field of vision, like a landscape obscured by a snowstorm.

Because it is an inherently nostalgic season, holiday movies are often set in a mythical past—a past we never had. But Alexander Payne’s new film, The Holdovers, uses the peculiar mythology of its time period in a special way. It filters sentimentality through lambent understatement. He lets a restive era fill our lungs, and the result is like a whiff of fresh pine.

As The Holdovers begins, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) passes out finals that most of his students have flunked. What this means is that they will go into Christmas telling their parents that their Ivy League ambitions are sunk. It is the last day before holiday break, in 1970, and these prep-school boys’ minds have already glazed over with ski trips and tropical getaways. Their classics teacher relents, slightly. They can take a mulligan on this exam—but will have to learn new material for the retake in January.

Killers of the Flower Moon

There is an incredible mystery, roiling, like oil, underneath the surface of Killers of the Flower Moon. It is the oil, however, that breaks through in the opening moments and drenches the Osage people—who happened upon it in their otherwise barren Oklahoma land, the sadistic endgame of the Trail of Tears. Sober-faced men dance around the geyser, emanating gratitude rather than joy. The black gold makes them filthy. They are now rich.

But this wealth came at a cost. David Grann’s 2017 account outlines the damning statistics of the Osage Reign of Terror, which occurred a century ago. The white population did not merely rob the Osages. Some insinuated themselves as trustees of Osage oil headrights and embezzled the fortunes. The tribe had the distinction of being the wealthiest group in America, per capita, while charting an outsize mortality rate. Many were poisoned; bad Prohibition-era liquor was used as cover. The families were then charged exorbitant rates for the funerals. It was a genocide within a genocide.

With one sister shot dead, and another blown up in a terrorist attack on her home, Mollie Burkhart (Lily Gladstone) seeks out President Coolidge’s support. Even if she did not know the extent to which the local authorities were fatally compromised, local law enforcement was nearly non-existent at that time. A Pinkerton agent hired by the tribe had already disappeared. In the book, the fledgling agency that would become J. Edgar Hoover’s F.B.I. takes the case, and Grann follows the investigation through the eyes of the fair-minded Agent Tom White (Jesse Plemons). In the film version, directed by Martin Scorsese—who co-wrote the script with Eric Roth—there is no mystery. Mollie’s husband Ernest (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the culprit.