Teachers Review Teacher Movies Vol. 2: The Holdovers (2023), Mr. Woodcock (2007), Detachment (2011)
Reviews that no one else could write.
Have you ever said, "That's not how that works!" when watching a movie set in your workplace? How about a movie where your job or career is glamorized or made to look easy? Are you a paper salesman that feels your career has been made a mockery of on The Office?
Teaching is one of those professions that's never depicted accurately or honestly. Enter Patrick (a middle school teacher) and Taylor (a former elementary school teacher) to review those movies about teachers, students, classrooms, and the crazy career path that is education.
The Holdovers (2023)
A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.
Patrick: There's so much to love about The Holdovers, a movie that landed on both of our year-end lists. It's tender, warm, and a new Christmas classic.
As a teacher, however, my favorite part is the string of insults that Giamatti directs toward his students early in the film, calling them everything from "degenerates" to "miscreants" to (my personal favorite) "hormonal vulgarians." I guarantee that some of these will be joining my repertoire, maybe even becoming go-tos.
The best one might even be when one of the students complains about his grade, saying he can't go to the Ivy League school his parents want him to attend. "I can't fail this class," he groans.
"Oh, don't sell yourself short," Giamatti replies with his sardonic wit. "I truly believe that you can."
Taylor: Because I taught little ones, I certainly wasn’t as curmudgeonly as Giamatti in this role. Could you imagine if I called a five-year-old a degenerate? Well, they probably wouldn’t know what it meant, but you get my point.
What touches me about this portrait of a teacher is the cynicism that comes with being beaten down by a difficult system. I tried to always be a ray of sunshine for my students, but I went home completely beat down and was unpleasant to just about everyone else in my life because of how exhausted I was.
While I never did a “holdover” per se, I did literally hold over two other Kindergarten classes for half the year. Yes, that’s right folks, I taught SEVENTY little kids...mostly by myself...for six months. Get the cynicism now?
Mr. Woodcock (2007)
Taken aback by his mother’s wedding announcement, a young man returns home in an effort to stop her from marrying his old high school gym teacher, a man who made high school hell for generations of students.
Patrick: This film has rattled around in my brain for many years. When I was a kid, circa 2009, we had terrible snowstorms one winter. My mom's job, however, didn't care and still made her come to work every day, so they put her up in a hotel across the street so she had no excuse to not show. Not old enough to be left alone for multiple days during a (mild) blizzard, she brought me with her. I would stay in the hotel all day long, watching the free HBO or Showtime or whatever it was that we didn't have at home, sneaking all the raunchy, uncut, R-rated stuff I wanted.
Mr. Woodcock was one such discovery, a movie I remembered being about a shitty gym teacher (I hated my middle school gym teacher at the time) who cursed up a storm, tortured his students, and bonked their moms. I remember it being off-color, explicit, and obscene.
Turns out it's not really any of those things! It's the watered-down, PG-13 version that only seemed crazier in my head because I shouldn't have been watching it. And although that is kinda the plot, it's also not - and it's not even really a teacher movie! Oops! Sorry!
Taylor: Definitely not a big “teacher story” but it did remind me of some of my worst teachers. Let’s explore them to fill the word count, shall we?
Mrs. Minter, 4th Grade: She was extremely mean, and one time I got her suspended for three days because I was the sole witness to her flipping a desk over on a student. Another time, we had to make the state of Virginia out of peanut butter cookie dough (I don’t know...) and she ate most of it and we couldn’t eat any. Finally, I remember that on April Fool’s Day, she told us she lost her voice and couldn’t teach, so we had to transcribe the entire dictionary. In my memory, she made us actually do it for ages, but I can’t say whether or not that's actually true.
Mr. Splendori, 6th + 7th Grade Gym: Because he had me for two years, he “thought we were close.” 7th Grade was a brutal year for me. Puberty. My first real heartbreak. Friend breakups. TUMBLR...I was going through it. He noticed this and told his first period (I was in second period) gym class that I was “an emotional wreck,” and then other students repeated it back to me for a week. My mom made him pull me out of my pre-algebra class and apologize. “I thought we were close…It was just a joke…I thought we could kid…” What a dick.
Detachment (2011)
A chronicle of three weeks in the lives of several high school teachers, administrators and students through the eyes of substitute teacher, Henry Barthes. Henry roams from school to school, imparting modes of knowledge, but never staying long enough to form any semblance of sentient attachment.
Patrick: It's important for people who watch Detachment, a film so devoid of hopefulness and happiness, to understand that it's not like this. I worry that some people may watch this movie and say, "That's what it's like at schools in Chicago!" or Baltimore or New York, where the movie takes place. There are classrooms and teachers and students and administrators like this everywhere, sure.
But the movie makes no effort to take place in a world we actually live in. It's education-as-metaphor, a hyperbolic place, a school of magical realism. Adrien Brody's character is constantly dragged down by his job, his students, his place of employment, his home life, his dying grandfather - the crushing weight of the world (which he expresses in the film's most unrealistic final scene.)
And yes, it can feel like that sometimes because it can be like that sometimes. But it is important, as the film points out, to get up every day and keep doing it. “Some of us believe that we can make a difference, and then sometimes we wake up and then realize we failed," he says in the film. You fail, but then you go in again the next day and do it again. When one student says, "I fucks with you," it's not only the nicest compliment he's heard the whole movie (and one I wouldn't mind hearing myself), but it shows that something worked - small as it may be. And that's something.
Credit: Each plot synopsis from Letterboxd via TMDb.
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