'The Holdovers' is a Christmas Miracle

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Hi, gang. I felt like writing about The Holdovers. I have something longer in the works (hence the lighter posting) but for now it’s this. Short answer? It’s good!

Alexaner Payne’s latest movie feels like he stole the premise from Wes Anderson, in a cinematic pseudo-cover song that manages to capture the best of both artists. Set at an all-boys New England boarding school in the winter of 1970, The Holdovers combines archaic jargon, steamy breath, and enough totems of mid-century Americana to make Anderson’s cravat damp with jealousy — all set to a soundtrack of jangly sixties folk that seems like it should be too obvious but burrows under your skin anyway.

The style, like the story itself, is something of a marriage of opposites. Whereas Anderson tends towards odes to things he loves — doodads, gewgaws, trinkets, and knickknacks — with obsessively curated cinematography that can reek of self-satisfaction, Payne is practically the bard of dissatisfaction. His characters are usually scruffy, slovenly middle-aged men who have become so inured to discontent that it barely registers anymore, at least until whatever plot or life event comes along and removes their blinders.

Symmetrical composition and meticulous production design clearly aren’t Payne’s central purpose, but there’s a warmth, a nostalgia that comes through in his recreation of 1970 New England, even when the landscape is barren and the characters are bastards; it makes for the perfect complement to his natural cynicism and bleak worldview. Alexander Payne movies don’t normally make me cry, but this time the son of a bitch really did it.

If Payne is the bard of dissatisfaction, Paul Giamatti is the face of it. Giamatti leapt from hangdog character actor to leading man thanks to his turn as an embittered wine snob/English teacher forever trying and failing to write the great American novel in Payne’s bachelor party sleeper hit, Sideways. Giamatti essentially plays an aged up, 1970 version of his Sideways character in The Holdovers, from screenwriter David Hemingson. Giamatti’s Paul Hunham is a hard-assed classics teacher who takes out his general dissatisfaction with life and modern society at large on his crew of entitled boarders and wealthy screwups at the Barton School outside Boston. He was once a scholarship boy there himself, but even after decades as a teacher, he still has the commoner’s complex, hiding his feelings of inferiority behind tweed, pipe smoke, smuggled whiskey, and impossible standards. He also has a wonky eye and stinks like fish.

His students all hate him, and for good reason: he doles out mostly Ds and Fs on their midterm essays, and when they complain about having to start new coursework in the last period before winter break, he cancels the make-up exam. He’s just as unpopular with the faculty, which is partly why he gets stuck with the job of staying on campus over the break to babysit the handful of students who won’t get to spend Christmas with their families — those titular “holdovers.” It wasn’t Hunham’s turn to take the job, but the headmaster is still pissed at him for refusing to bend on a better grade for the son of major donors.

That leaves Hunham stuck with depressive Tully (Dominic Sessa), shithead Kountz (Brady Hepner), Mormon Ollerman (Ian Dolley), Korean Park (Jim Kaplan), and Johnny Football Hero Smith (Michael Provost), whose rich dad is punishing him for refusing to cut his hair. Hunham eventually strikes up an unlikely friendship, or at least tolerationship, with the most tragic of the boys, Tully, who had his bags all packed for the Caribbean when his mom dropped the bomb that she and his stepdad decided it should be their honeymoon instead, no kids allowed.

They hate each other, they’re stuck together, and no one is happy about it: a classic setup. And both of them know they have no room to complain in front of the only holdover from the Barton staff: Mary Lamb, whose son was killed in Vietnam earlier in the year. She’s played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who turns in yet another absolutely magnetic performance after having been the brightest bright spot in The Idol. Pure soul to Giamatti’s pure neuroses, they make a wondrous combination.

Imagine Royal Tenenbaum’s rapport with his grandkids with the twee turned down and the realism cranked up three notches and you have something like the misanthropic bromance between Tully and Hunham. Tully is a blunt prick and Hunham is a bitter drunk who reflexively fears human affection. Both are tragic and largely detestable, but their chemistry is so simultaneously unusual and undeniable that when you actually end up rooting for them it feels that much sweeter, like we’ve come by our affection honestly.

Dominic Sessa, an actual student at the school where The Holdovers was shot when the casting director discovered him, isn’t as consistent a performer as Giamatti or Randolph (and honestly, who is?) but his crooked smile, massive Adam’s apple, and Ichabod Crane physique project Holden Caufield perfectly. And he truly does deliver when the film needs him to. Carrie Preston, perfectly cast as what passes for The Holdovers’ romantic interest, has a delightful turn, but Alexander Payne never cheats. Cheap crowd-pleasing isn’t really his bag, and likewise, when The Holdovers’ script serves up a prime opportunity for a Scent of a Woman-style ending, Payne and Hemingson pivot. It’s hard to even imagine an Alexander Payne movie ending with a powerful speech — the only speech moment that comes to mind from his filmography is the two guys in the crowd shouting “EAT ME. EAT ME RAW” during the school assembly in Election.

And so Giamatti doesn’t get a speech, naturally, just a single insult. With this much build up, it carries with it a high degree of difficulty, but Payne and Hemingston choose their best four or five word phrase and stick the landing like gold medal gymnasts, 10 out of 10.

It’s fitting: this isn’t a film about us learning a big lesson. Bastards are mostly still bastards and some assholes will always be assholes, so it goes. Like Sideways, it offers just the faint wisp of hope that something about the odd life interlude we’ve just witnessed has maybe, just maybe, changed something in a few of these characters for the better.

It’s probably still not something you throw on with the kiddos every year, but The Holdovers is, in a non-magical thinking kind of way, one of the best Christmas movies I’ve ever seen.

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