The Holdovers opens in select cities October 27, and nationwide November 10. This review is based on a screening at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.
Alexander Payne has been making lukewarm dramas for about 20 years now, but his latest – set in a haughty New England boarding school in 1970 – plays like an instant coming-of-age classic. Starring Paul Giamatti in a role that feels spiritually tethered to his depressed writer/teacher character in Payne’s Sideways, The Holdovers follows the animus and eventual friendship of an unlikely duo – cranky history teacher Paul Hunham (Giamatti) and his short-tempered pupil Angus Tully (newcomer Dominic Sessa) – forced into each other’s company over Christmas break.
Citing director Hal Ashby as a key influence, Payne claims he aimed to not only emulate the films of the 1970s, but create something that felt like it was made in the era of Ashby’s Harold and Maude and The Last Detail, which he ensures via The Holdovers’ retro-stylized studio logos. However, the results are far closer in style and spirit to ’80s mainstay John Hughes. The broad strokes of its premise might seem overly familiar today, but it’s a film that slowly, carefully, and uproariously peels back the layers of its lead characters, yielding a meaningful drama and character-centric comedy (often in the same moments) in the process.
The way Payne captures Barton Academy, the film’s prestigious Christian prep school, is akin to Wes Anderson’s conception of Rushmore, at least in imaginative idiosyncrasy if not hyper-stylized aesthetic. It feels both like a place depicted at a specific period in time, as well as a place out of time, with shots of its snow-capped buildings backgrounded by gray skies lacking in detail, as if this institution were dropped in the middle of nowhere from Payne’s imagination (sketched, perhaps, from several of his own Omaha alma mater). Its teenage students, like the foul-mouthed Angus, bicker like any other hormonal boys in close proximity, taking shots at each other’s mothers for no reason in particular, but there’s a wistfulness to the way these scenes are introduced, given the light, folky guitar-plucking that scores establishing shots of each structure and hallway.
However, there’s a quick and sudden departure to both the style and music the moment Giamatti’s Professor Paul Hunham is introduced; the expansive world and its gentle rhythms outside cut suddenly to his cramped quarters and the classical tunes he plays, as he mumbles to himself about the students he dislikes – which is to say, most of them. “Philistines,” he whispers under his breath while smoking his pipe. He hears a knock and his one good eye darts towards the door; it's Barton administrator Lydia (Carrie Preston) offering him colorful Christmas cookies, which he begrudgingly accepts without a word of thanks. He's a caricature of a curmudgeonly academic, whose every sentence is laced with condescending snark, and who can’t seem to hold a conversation without taking a dozen detours into his chosen field (European antiquity), owing to his firm belief that the present is a fixed extension of the past.
He also has a grudge against the spoiled 1 percenters and legacy admissions that seem to make up most of Barton’s student body, a disdain he expresses through both words and strict grades that run the risk of toppling the boys’ college prospects. When Angus stands up to Hunham, the instructor slickly turns the other boys against him. Giamatti plays the character as a cartoonish tyrant, but as the oncoming winter break is set to prove, there’s far more to him than that.
Four students are set to spend their December at school, and Hunham has the misfortune of being chosen to babysit them – or as he envisions it, give them an extra semester of work. However, Angus is added to their ranks at the last minute, when his mother cruelly concocts a reason to keep her son away for Christmas in order to spend time with her new husband.
After a while, happenstance leaves Angus as the only holdover within Barton’s walls, forcing him to spend two weeks with Hunham as well as the school’s sharp-tongued head cook, Mary (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), a woman mourning the loss of her son in the Vietnam War. The threat of being drafted looms large over Angus, as does a military academy being the only alternative if he gets kicked out of Barton, which makes his impatient outbursts (and his and Hunham’s mutual contempt) feel immediately imbued with palpable stakes.
The more time the trio is forced to spend together – usually eating in the empty dining hall, but on occasion lounging in front of the school’s only television set – the more they begin to feel like a family, albeit a disjointed, dysfunctional one. It’s from this starting point that Payne begins to open each character up while training his camera on them in gentle, compassionate close ups, using their confrontations as a gateway to each other’s pasts and complete personalities. The further The Holdovers gets into its 133-minute runtime, the more it feels like an embodiment of truly getting to know someone, bit by bit, in ways that put into context their eccentricities and their most risible or irritating qualities.
There’s a fluidity to Payne’s scene construction, and a snappiness to his dialogue that never feels trite, owing to the way Giamatti and Sessa fully embody their characters in both tone and poise. Giamatti waddles into each scene with a bug-eyed glare, as if he’s searching for the right thing to say before inevitably landing on an offensive faux paus; it’s a mesmerizing performance, sketched through dialogue, thought, and their constant struggle. Meanwhile, the hot-headed Angus seems to want things Hunham can’t give him. As his caretaker for the break, he can’t provide the space the kid needs to process being rejected by his family. As a male figure of authority incapable of seeing beyond himself and tasked with teaching within narrow academic parameters, he can’t offer the warmth and paternal guidance Angus sorely lacks.
Through numerous circumstances born from Angus’s desire to escape Hunham’s leash (not to mention, Barton’s frigid confines), student and teacher are thrust repeatedly into various comedies of errors – including, at one point, a visit to the emergency room – during which they become privy to each other’s hidden vulnerabilities. After a while, the harsh glares they reserve for one another begin to soften into looks of recognition. Their scorn turns to curiosity, and eventually to care – though it’s a hilariously bumpy road, with Hunham’s verbose history-talk clashing constantly with Angus’s more direct and pointed jabs.
These exchanges ought to feel disconnected, but there’s a whip-smart musicality to them, which Payne ensures through his unwavering focus on building and revealing ethos. Giamatti and Sessa, in turn, translate this rhythm into body language and physical comedy – one scene in particular, at a liquor store, turns the duo simply walking around into a finessed two-man act – and when it comes time to focus this energy, they find laser-precise balance between their characters’ egotistical armor and the suppressed emotions it protects. And while Mary does occasionally feel swept into her own little corner of the film, let it not be said that Randolph doesn’t also swing for the fences, as a grieving voice of reason, often forcing Hunham and Angus to see each other in more complete ways, like ego negotiating between pompous super-ego and volatile id.
The more intimately the characters get to know each other, the more we grow to know them as well, inside out – not only in ways that flesh out their drama, but in ways that make their quips and jabs practically self-evident, in the way one knows exactly what a loved one might say in a given scenario. Of course, this makes their punchlines no less funny. If anything it makes us privy to what feels like a litany of inside jokes, the kind where jabs at the insecurities of a best friend or sibling become good natured, allowing the movie to build its comedy and drama not only side by side, but often in the same moments. It becomes hilarious and moving all at once, en route to a climax that tugs at the heartstrings with its melodrama but feels realistically cathartic, translating affection into actions that are character-specific and deeply personal.
