Warning — the following riff contains a Civil War spoiler:
On 10.23.23 L.A. Times critic Justin Chang scolded The Holdovers over an incident of racial animosity between two minor characters — a snotty white kid named Teddy Kountze (Brady Hepner) and a fragile Korean student named Ye-Joon Park (Jim Kaplan). Early on Kountze belittles Park by calling him “Mr. Moto” — a trigger in more ways than one.
Chang: “In reducing Ye-Joon to such an abused prop, is The Holdovers really any better [than Kountze]? Can anyone watch a scene this callous and then be honestly moved by [Giamatti’s] speech about the injustices of American racism, classism and white privilege?”
In short Chang felt obliged to admonish The Holdovers, which is mostly set in December 1970, for having committed a woke crime.
Chang is back with the same kind of complaint in his 4.14 New Yorker review of Civil War. There’s a scene in which the lives of a pair of journalists come to a terrible end. Because of the ethnicity of these characters, Chang calls this scene “dubiously contrived.” He then asks “was it really necessary to introduce and then immediately sacrifice two nonwhite characters to score a point about the racism that lurks in America’s heartland?”
The below New Yorker illustration is by Clay Rodery.
