Set in the early 1970s, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers opens on the snowy campus of Barton Academy, an elite Massachusetts boarding school, just before the two-week Christmas break. Alas, not all of the students are able to join their families for various reasons and those few remain in campus under the watch of a teacher unfortunate enough to get stuck with the gig. This year, that teacher is Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a curt and exacting ancient history teacher whose high standards and undisguised contempt for those who fail to live up to them—which is pretty much everyone—has made him loathed by students and the administration alike. Among the kids stuck in his charge is Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), an undeniably smart kid whose bad attitude has already gotten him kicked out of three top schools, who is there because his mom and her new husband decided to make their planed family vacation into a honeymoon. When all of the other holdovers are able to go off on a ski vacation except for Angus, whose parents could not be reached for permission, an already lousy situation threatens to become intolerable. However, over the course of the holiday period, the former antagonists begin to discover that they are not that dissimilar and a bond develops between them that proves to have unexpected consequences when a side trip to Boston winds up going sideways, no pun intended.
Having served up a conspicuous critical and commercial failure with his previous feature, the bewildering satire Downsizing, it is perhaps not too surprising that Payne would retreat to more familiar elements for his next project. Indeed, The Holdovers does at times feel like a hybrid of bits from his two most notable films, Election and Sideways, mixed in with a 70s-style New Hollywood vibe that extends to both the visual style and its soundtrack of period-accurate folk-rock faves. The problem is that while those previous Payne efforts, along with others like Citizen Ruth, About Schmidt and Nebraska, all offered up oddball stories laced with quietly cutting social satire that gave them a certain and undeniable distinction (one that also inspired accusations that Payne was being too condescending in his attitudes), the screenplay for this film, by TV writer David Hemingson, is so fuzzily familiar that you can pretty much predict every single dramatic beat—sometimes even exact lines of dialogue—before they turn up. Payne handles it all in a smoothly efficient manner but, compared to both the efforts of the 70s auteurs like Hal Ashby that he is clearly paying homage to and his own previous works, it can’t help but feel a little too formulaic for its own good at times. The result is smooth and glib enough to make for a reasonably entertaining film but it is hard to believe that this was made by the same guy who gave us Election.
What does make The Holdovers worth watching despite the occasionally ho-hum nature of the screenplay are the three knockout performances at its center. Casting Giamatti in the role of Paul seems almost too obvious, I suppose, but his work here is so good—arguably his best turn since his previous teaming with Payne on Sideways—would complain about that. We all know someone (possibly even a teacher) just like Hunham—someone who knows that he is smart and above it all and perfectly willing to advertise that fact despite knowing that it will win him no friends (he would be the guy who would barge into a conversation about this film and go on at length about how manipulative it is and how dumb viewers would have to be in order to fall for it)—and he captures that type with pinpoint accuracy while displaying unexpected moments of humanity that feel organic and not merely the contrivance of the script.
As Mary, the school’s head chef (and one of the only Black faces on campus) who has chosen to stay behind on campus as well while mourning the recent loss of her son, a former Barton student who, unlike his classmates, got sent off to die in Vietnam, Da’Vine Joy Randolph takes a potentially problematic role and does wonders with it throughout, scoring some big laughs while at the same time demonstrating her character’s pain in ways that are subtle but undeniably effective. The real surprise is Sessa, who is so good and so believable in his head-to-head scenes with Giamatti that I was a little stunned afterwards to discover that this was his debut screen performance—this is a true star-making turn and the start of what could be an enormously promising career.
The Holdovers may not be a great Payne film—it may be the first one he has made that feels as if it could have been done by someone else—but it is certainly a good one that reasserts his abilities after the confounding botch that was Downsizing. Even if it does lack the edge, unpredictability and caustic wit of his best films, it has a charm and humanity that never feels forced (although it comes close towards the end) and which helps to push it through the occasionally lockstep nature of the big dramatic beats. Moreover, it reminds us of his gift for getting great career-making performances from the actors who have crossed his path over the years. Ultimately, the film may just be a warm nostalgia bath—both for the period evoked within it and for the long-lost time when mid-budget films aimed primarily at adult audiences were relatively common things and not the rarities that they are today—but in the end, it happens to be a fairly effective one