Directed by Alexander Payne. Written by David Hemingson
A corduroy pants and tweed jacket combo of a movie, The Holdovers is a disarming and warm coming-together of unlikely people who in each other find the courage to carry on. Witty, poignant, even beautiful at times, it’s a space heater pointed directly at the cockles of your heart.
It’s December 1970 at Barton Academy, a preppy boarding school for children of the rich. Kids are leaving for the holidays, off for sunny isles or ski slopes. Most important of all, they’re off to be with their families. Not so for “the holdovers,” the unhappy few who are staying on campus for the next two weeks.
Most unhappy is Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa). His vacation is snatched away at the 11th hour by a mother who decides it’s time for the honeymoon she never got with Angus’ step-dad. As he pleads for her to change her mind, Angus clutches the phone like a lifeline but finds it untethered.
Charged with these two-week orphans’ safety is Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), who teaches disinterested teens about ancient civilizations. An obstinate curmudgeon, he drinks to excess, suffers from hemorrhoids, antagonizes his boss, and bedevils his silver spoon students, many of whom he quietly disdains for that very reason. Something festers beneath it all.
Carrying their respective vexations, and cursed by each other’s company, a thinly veiled metaphor sees them bunk in the infirmary, as heating is turned off in both staff and student housing over the holidays. Angus’s face locked into a snarl, and Paul’s walrus mustache is a guillotine blade. Let the merriments commence.
Hunham’s charged with their safety, but it’s in fact Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) who will keep these boys and men alive. As head of catering, she’s there this holiday because it’ll be the first without her only son, a scholarship student at Barton who, unlike his white classmates, had to serve his country in Vietnam and is now dead. She clutches the grief she carries and rightfully suffers no fools.
The Holdovers is a slow thaw. Icy interactions give way to tender recognition of mutual pain, and humanity wills its way out. The script by Hemingson has a sophisticated lilt to its dialogues that isn’t self-important, offering instead some keen turn of phrases that become jabs in the hands of Payne’s skillful actors.
Sessa and Giamatti are both a bracing and comedic duo with a rubber and glue dynamic that gets less so as The Holdovers moves along. By the end, as these two men have uncovered the others’ hurt and proven themselves worthy of the privilege, there’s nothing but an approving nod to give.
But it’s between them that Randolph is the moon that guides the tides of The Holdovers. Mary is living through just about the worst thing that can befall a parent, and the quiet overcoming Randolph delivers is a piece of magic. A restorative act of grace.
Adding the crackle and grain of film to the digital capture, Payne turns back the time with The Holdovers. More than an aesthetic choice, it also feels like a conditioning of shorts, as it decouples our modern expectation of quick cuts, action-oriented plots, and clear objectives. The Holdovers is a throwback in that regard, focusing instead of slow, teasing, build-up rooted in clever writing that grows into a powerful meditation on the supposed ills of society and the humanity whereby we are restored.
It could have become one big kumbaya, but it isn’t. The Holdovers is too observant of the many injustices all will have to suffer, but its warm, compassionate treatment of those unpleasant thoughts will bolster you against any cold wind that blows.
Mikkel Frederiksen 