An unlikely friendship forming over the course of a particularly melancholy Christmas period is one of Hollywood’s most reliable go-to plots, predictable and comforting in its structure, finding power not in surprise but in the slow build to an inevitably heartwarming payoff. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers continues this rich tradition, and though you might expect the frequently acerbic Payne to subvert this genre, he instead simply aims to prove just why it works so well. The result is a true delight, funny and humane and deeply moving, led by three of the most exquisite performances you’ll see in any film this year.
The Christmas here is Christmas 1970, and the location Barton Academy, an elite boys’ boarding school in Massachusetts. The first member of our trifecta of unlikely allies is ancient history teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a grumpy old sod disliked by both his students and fellow teachers for both his manners and his off-putting smell (a lazy eye and a drinking habit certainly don’t help matters). He’s been saddled with ‘holding over’, in charge of looking after any boys whose parents haven’t come to pick them up over the Christmas break, with his sole ward ending up being the academically bright but wilfully difficult Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a student approaching the end of his school days.
Rounding out the three is cafeteria manager Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who has chosen to stay at Barton over Christmas to feel close to her own son Curtis, who studied there before being drafted to Vietnam, where he was killed. The Holdovers follows the natural pattern you’d expect for the most part – though Paul and Mary are at least professionally friendly from the start – beginning as irritated strangers thrust together by circumstance before getting to know each other over the two-week break and eventually becoming a surrogate family.
The strength here is not in being unpredictable, but in building these characters so well that the tropes of the genre feel completely natural. Payne’s writing gives so many layers and laughs to all three of them, from Paul’s grouchiness hiding a very earnest distaste for injustice to Mary keeping a distance from her maternal instincts to the specific ways Angus lies to retain *some* dignity in his situation. All three actors respond to the superb material with equally magnificent performances – Giamatti, both hilarious and earnestly affecting, equals his previous high water mark (also for Payne) of Sideways, Randolph is both commanding and heartbreaking, while Sessa is just an incredible find.
Unbelievably, this is Sessa’s first ever acting role, but the performance Payne coaxes from him is flawless in its grasping awkwardness, neither boy nor man but that horribly embarrassing middle stage that is over in a flash in the long-term but feels like forever when you’re living it. He absolutely stacks up to Giamatti in all the scenes they share together, and all three leads make the inner worlds of these characters just as immersive as the ‘70s New England winter that Payne surrounds them with.
Barton’s grounds become as familiar and intimate as if you’d attended the school yourself, whilst the gently catchy soundtrack puts you right into the era. Payne puts tremendously effective work into not just setting his film in the ‘70s, but making it feel as if it could have been in the year it’s set in, which works not just on an aesthetic level, but everything about its sensibilities. Here is a clever, funny, and empathetic film about real, and distinct-looking, people of various class backgrounds finding human solutions to human problems, the kind that were ubiquitous in decades past but feel like rare diamonds today.
With that said, The Holdovers would be a rare diamond in any era, the kind where a filmmaker and his cast are in such perfect sync that you find yourself grinning or misty-eyed seemingly out of nowhere. Yes, there are obvious centrepiece scenes (in fact, a middle-act one at a Christmas Eve party is the moment that The Holdovers really clicks into place), but Payne wrings depth and pathos out of moments that could be otherwise completely innocuous. If you’ve seen the trailers, you might be expecting an out-and-out comedy, and The Holdovers isn’t actually quite that – it’s definitely still funny, but that’s not always its prime directive. What it is instead is a drama of the most uplifting kind, a completely uncynical ode to Christmas and found families that doesn’t shy away from their respective difficulties, but finds additional joy within the struggle. A festive gem.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 