Review: The Holdovers

Image courtesy of Focus Features.

Set against the snowy backdrop of Massachusetts, circa 1970, Alexander Payne's "The Holdovers" is an example - similar to another very good film this week, David Fincher's "The Killer" - of taking a familiar formula or storyline and approaching it from a different angle, thereby creating something magical from a scenario that might have come across as dusty in lesser hands.

The film follows the friendship that blossoms between a cantankerous teacher and his wily young student - but also a school cafeteria manager - when the trio gets stuck together at the school over the Christmas holiday break. This might sound like the stuff of cliche, but its execution is far from it and the result is Payne's best film in over a decade.

Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti, great as ever) is a grouchy professor at the prestigious Barton Academy in the early 1970s who is hated by his students and fellow teachers alike. When another teacher weasels out of the assignment of spending the holiday break at the school - and watching over the few students who are not going home for those holidays - Hunham gets stuck with the gig, which he sees as punishment from the headmaster for having failed a legacy student who, as a result, didn't get into an Ivy League school.

A small group of students are stuck at the school during the holidays but all but one of them - Angus (Dominic Sessa in a great breakout performance) - will end up fleeing early when an invitation for a ski trip arises. Angus' mother has recently remarried and hopes to use the holidays for the honeymoon she never took with her new husband, leaving Angus alone at the school with grumpy Hunham and head cook Mary (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), who is grieving the death of her son, seemingly the only student at the school - most likely because he was Black and didn't have rich parents - who was drafted and sent to the Vietnam War.

Hunham is a stickler for rules and comes off as the type of guy who likes to make others' lives miserable by adhering to them simply because he can and it's the only bit of power that he holds. He's also a wiz at insults, and Giamatti gets to deliver some absolute humdingers during the course of the film. He sees it as his personal hell that he's stuck having to keep an eye on wealthy brats over the holidays, which he'd rather spend with his nose in a book, although it is established early on that Angus is among the few students who actually do well in Hunham's class.

But small moments of decency begin to break through the gloom of these three sad sacks - Angus has his own share of problems, from a mother and stepfather who want him out of the picture during the holidays to some other issues that are slowly revealed through the course of the picture. The first is when a good-natured colleague, Lydia (Carrie Preston), whom Hunham discovers to also be a part-time waitress during the holidays at a local restaurant, invites the trio to her holiday party, where Angus develops a crush on an attendee, Mary has an emotional breakdown over her dead son, and a fourth character, Danny (Naheem Garcia), a school janitor who has feelings for Mary, gets thrown into the mix.

Mary chides Hunham after he angrily tells Angus that he's not happy to be stuck with him over the holidays, arguing that he shouldn't try to ditch a boy who's been treated as an afterthought by his family. She suggests that Hunham, as the song says, try a little tenderness and he makes an attempt at getting into the spirit of the season by purchasing a dilapidated tree and buying gifts for his fellow holdovers, which provides for a pretty good joke.

But the film's centerpiece involves a road trip to Boston - which Angus had been expecting on the drive home with his mother before leaving for the trip to St. Kitts from which he was given the boot - where Hunham and Angus leave Mary with her sister. The two bond over a trip to a museum, a screening of Arthur Penn's "Little Big Man" and a series of lies they tell to others they come across that they promise to keep entre nous. Both characters have pasts that they'd hoped to have kept hidden, but as they begin to confide in one another, they realize that the other isn't so bad as they'd originally expected.

"The Holdovers" is unexpectedly sentimental - and I don't mean that as a pejorative - considering it is from the director of "Election" and "About Schmidt." This stems from Payne obviously caring about these characters and having compassion for their struggles. On the other hand, the picture is full of the acidic humor that we'd expect from the director. 

For a movie that involves a lot of melancholic plot threads involving death, depression, failed career ambitions, and alienation from one's family, "The Holdovers" is often riotously funny, featuring some of the best turns of phrase - uttered with contempt for those around him by Giamatti - of recent memory. One of the biggest laughs involves a run-in with a Boston prostitute, while another has to do with a failed attempt at recreating a dessert.

It has been six years since Payne's last movie, "Downsizing," which had its moments but was considered at the time to be a financial and critical misfire. "The Holdovers" features the best elements of his finest work - "Sideways," "About Schmidt," "Election," and "The Descendants" - and is not only his finest film in a number of years, but also one of the best of 2023 so far.