I had a few teachers I adored in my years at school – and one or two, perhaps, who even inspired me in some capacity – but I can’t say a film about my relationship with them would make for particularly thrilling viewing. Teaching is hard graft, and often thankless; even the best in the profession are rarely rewarded with the kind of dewy, triumphant tributes that cap off many a Hollywood classroom drama. Yet the inspirational teacher film remains a mainstay: film-makers never tire of imagining the schooldays they’d like to have had.
Paul Giamatti offers a variation on the type in The Holdovers, out on VOD last week: the curmudgeonly, academically oriented teacher with (surprise!) a heart of gold beneath it all. Alexander Payne’s misfit comedy counts for its emotional effect on the familiarity of its characters and settings. Giamatti’s crusty classics professor, outmoded but still with something to give, is essentially an American rewrite of the antiquated public schoolmaster at the centre of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version, so beautifully played by Michael Redgrave in 1951 (Internet Archive), and again by Albert Finney in a 1994 remake that’s more readily streamable.
