The Holdovers

Note: I had originally wanted to post this last month, as it would've been a perfect entry in my Christmas movie canon, a tradition over the past few years, but didn't catch it in time....

2023's THE HOLDOVERS has become a new holiday classic for me.  I kinda knew I'd love it from the time I saw the trailer late last summer.  Its premise one with which I've long been fascinated - what happens to those pour souls stuck on a school campus during Christmas break.  With parents unable or unwilling to have them back home.  A deserted campus really intrigues me.  

Director Alexander Payne and screenwriter David Hemingson don't go the existential route here, ala something like THE MAN WHO SLEEPS, but rather fashion a crowd pleasing yet literate comedy-drama that is sometimes predictable but also favors realistic outcomes over Hollywood Christmas miracles.

History prof. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is a gruff longtimer at Barton Academy, a tony New England boarding school.  He once attended the prestigious institution but his life didn't quite pan out until he returned to attempt teach these rich little shits something.  Perhaps because he refuses to give passing grades to the (sometimes rather dense) sons of well connected donors, he suffers a career of mediocrity and frustration.  And isolation, but he's fine with that, content with spending the break reading mystery novels and smoking his pipe. 

When the teacher assigned to supervising "the holdovers" has to bow out due to the death of a family member,  which Hunham knows is a ruse,  Paul is saddled with a small group of boys, who resent him even more as he puts them through study hall and sprints out in the snow.  After some developments, only Angus (Dominic Sessa), a sharp but caustic and bitter teen, remains.  His newly remarried mother has chosen to honeymoon with her new groom instead of taking her son to Saint Kitts.  Will Angus and Paul eventually get along?  Will Mary (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), Barton's head cook who is grieving the death of her son in Vietnam,  find healing amidst her annoyance with these not so dissimilar manboys?

You know the answers.  But Payne is such gifted social observer that caricatures will open up into fully fleshed humans.  He will allow moments that interrupt scenes that seem to be heading in a certain direction.  The Christmas Eve party is the best example, one that is by turns humorous and sad. That can describe Payne's method, and all of his films, (er, except maybe this one) are little masterpieces of the fragility of societal mores.   At times uproarious comedy trading spaces with pathos.  Here it works so beautifully.  

The film takes place in 1970/'71, and THE HOLDOVERS, despite being shot digitally mostly looks and feels like a film of its era.  There are even instances of dirt (added in post production) to replicate celluloid.  This kind of film was more common back when Nixon was threading his reel to reels, and welcome to see in this era of overbudgeted slickery and vapid indies. 

Giamatti, reunited with Payne twenty years after SIDEWAYS, is perfect.  The very definition of curmudgeon.  Some of his lines are instant classics, including the final one he delivers to the headmaster.

If I have a complaint it's that the film maybe runs a little too long, introducing a late plot development that feels a little contrived, to wring more drama out of this story.  But it does lead to a bittersweet final scene, very much in the best of the Payne tradition.