Alexander Payne is one of our great working directors, but he’s hardly the most prolific. It’s been 6 years since Downsizing, Payne’s previous and rather more ambitious sci-fi climate-focused film starring Matt Damon and Hong Chau that was largely critically panned. This time around, Payne has gone back to basics with The Holdovers, a character-focused dramedy about Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) a New England boarding school Classics teacher who is tasked with watching the handful of students who have nowhere else to go and must stay at the school over winter break.
The film is not only set in the 1970s, Payne also uses a 1.66 aspect ratio and a grainy texture and 70s style (Cat Stevens-infused) soundtrack to make it feel like it was made fifty years ago as well. Giamatti is brilliant as the lead – along with being a frontrunner for best actor, he could fill a book of best quotes from this movie alone: watching this is a much more fun way to study SAT vocabulary hearing Giamatti mutter about vulgar Philistines, hidebound troglodytes, the vicissitudes of life, snarling visigoths, and feted layabouts.
While Hunham is curmudgeonly to his core and literally stinks of rotten fish, he is surrounded by a group of entitled prep school teenage boys – there’s a thoughtful class commentary as a motif – led by Angus Tully (first time actor Dominic Sessa), who is grouchy and sensitive. The group is accompanied by Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) a sole cook who provides the meals. The autocratic Hunham is begged at one point by the headmaster to “at least try to pretend to act like a human being” for the sake of Christmas.
As the winter break progresses, the Breakfast Club setup turns into a more traditional found family movie. To paraphrase the film, the school is a locked henhouse full of hurt assholes, tinged with sadness, for those who have no other place to go. Will the magic of Christmas win out in the end? They each start out insecure and cynical (Hunham at one point quips that “trust is just a name in a bank”), but over time, the iciness begins to thaw and they open up to each other, and build that kind of intimate and trusting relationship entre nous.
With The Holdovers, Payne has not only defended his belt as the master of the sad-sack comedy, but has done the nearly impossible by creating an instant holiday classic. The film mixes that wry and subtly barbing humor that Payne is so good at, with the loneliness and resentment of a less than ideal Christmas. The aphorism is that they don’t make them like this anymore, but this film is the exception to the rule. Miller High Life may be the champagne of beers, but The Holdovers is ultimately more like a warm and comforting cup of piping hot apple cider.
Now streaming on Peacock.
