Directed by Alexander Payne
Year: 2023
Language: English
Shaun’s Score: 4.1/5 ★
Before Watching:
Look, I watched Zoey 101 and Dead Poets Society like every other American child growing up. This is to say that even though I attended public school, the wry charms of boarding school are not lost on me. Accordingly, Alexander Payne’s newest film proves that you don’t need to have lived through New England prep school trauma to feel PTSD when watching it on the screen. (Mostly kidding). And for all of its copious SAT words and Oscar-courting, the film somehow manages a touching story that plays like an instant classic Christmas fable, just downgrading Whoville to Who-gives-a-shit-ville (Boston).
Paul Giamatti did in fact go through New England boarding school—then Yale, twice—and he remains one of the most underused and underrated actors in his generation. In The Holdovers, he portrays Paul Hunham, a curmudgeonly classics teacher at Barton Academy for boys who has gotten on the headmaster’s bad side (a former student of his) for defiantly flunking a Senator’s dumbass son. This winter break, he is accordingly tasked with babysitting the handful of “holdover” students who can’t make it home for the holidays. Joining him is cafeteria supervisor and bereaved mother Mary (a wonderful Da’Vine Joy Randolph). Just when Hunham seems content with the school’s resentment of him for his controversial, IDGAF grading pedagogy, one student (Dominic Sessa) makes his heart grow three sizes. Perhaps Christmas beauty is in the lazy eye of the beholder.
The Holdovers is old-timey in all the right ways.1 The title sequence lilts along with anachronistic logos, with music and production design evoking the flavor of classic Americana we’ve been missing in the Marvel era. Oh sure, Giamatti is a mischievous little walrus, but he delivers a masterclass in the use of character diction. Hunham rattles off insults at the student body of “rancid little philistines,” but can quite never find the words to accept praise or comfort loss. The Holdovers is consistent, beautifully trim in scope, funny in the right doses, and brimming with ideas on found family. Kore-eda, undoubtedly, when watching this film: “stunning… too much color… why is everyone yelling?”
I hear the critiques that Payne sidesteps the 1970s political landscape, but you don’t have to be such a payne in the ass.2 The film is very precise in its objectives—to an extent that would usually nauseate The New Yorker—and too much partisan hackery could quickly turn a Christmas miracle into “there’s a WAR on Christmas!” I’m sated as-is; nothing wrong with pouring some bourbon in your eggnog and simply allowing this movie to have a hold over you.
The Holdovers premiered at the 50th Telluride Film Festival, and can now be streamed on Peacock or purchased on Prime and Apple TV.
After Watching:
Barbie has now been demoted to second-best 2023 movie line about fascism, after Giamatti’s “Christ on a crutch, what kind of fascist hash foundry are you running here?”
Evidently, bildungsromane need not be so cookie-cutter. All three main characters have their own maturation arcs of some form, even Paul’s lessons on love (we know that inescapable fishy odor + an ostentatiously open tube of hemorrhoid cream doesn’t scream “I’m Kenough”). Mary’s in particular is tender to the point of devastation, delivered with a patience that allows Randolph to guide her sleigh3 tonight (to the top of the Oscars betting pools). I just wish the film didn’t seek to explain itself so much—did we really need the lazy eye joke as a closing button?
I’ll acquiesce on the contrived clichés of his teachings. In their Boston Museum visit—already drifting too close to “we’re not so different, you and I”—the whole throw in some (...gay?) pornography and I suddenly understand ancient Greece schtick is an eye-roll moment. The scene is a minor departure from non-trite dialogue, but it does carry a certain “Ron DeSantis would hate this” je ne sais quoi,4 so I’ll allow it.
Ultimately, I’m most impressed with Payne’s synthesized melancholy. The Holdovers is certainly funny—in the way Chekhov is funny?5—but it’s also achingly nostalgic. A land before TikTok, where teens had to entertain themselves by stealing each other’s cigarettes and defacing precious family photos (the OG cyberbullying); what’s the ’70s equivalent of “Be Best”? In this Nixon stone age, having family present is so much more significant. Perhaps it’s the fuzzy image quality, the 1.66 aspect ratio, the close-up-zoom-back shot lifted from The Godfather, or just the snowy New England landscape, but Paul Hunham brings “that’s MY Roman Empire” to a whole new level.
The Fabelmans, all the wrong ways. Top Gun: Maverick, just all the “you kids get off my lawn!” ways?
Shut up, I’m trying here. You try making puns out of “Giamatti.”
And slay 👏
Oh Jeremy. You (like Paul) went to Yale and won an Emmy for playing a superiority complex, but at least Paul didn’t nearly bankrupt the Dramat...