A film review by Craig J. Koban January 28, 2024

THE HOLDOVERS

2023, R, 133 mins.

Paul Giamatti as Paul Hunham  /  Dominic Sessa as Angus Tully  /  Da'Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb  /  Carrie Preston as Lydia Crane  /  Gillian Vigman as Judy  /  Dan Aid as Kenneth  /  Colleen Clinton as Mrs. Cavanaugh  /  Dustin Tucker as Professor Rosensweig  /  Bill Mootos as Professor Endicott

There's an utterly hilarious - but telling - moment very early on in Alexander Payne's THE HOLDOVERS that tells you really everything that you're going to need to about its story and main character.  

We see New England boarding school classics teacher Paul Hunham (played by Paul Giamatti) grading his students' latest exams.  Now, this seems like a fairly ordinary kind of scene, but we immediately gain insight into just what kind of insufferable curmudgeon that Giamatti is playing.  He's not just angry at his students' lack of proper answers in the exams...he eviscerates them in the most deeply stuck-up way possible.  "Philistines," he says to himself while frustratingly filling their exams with red marks, "Lazy, vulgar, rancid little Philistines!"    

It doesn't get more personal and specific than that.    

Paul works a fairly low-respect job at New England's Barton Academy, where he once was a student on a scholarship.  Now - in December 1970 - he's the type of hard-edged and annoyingly abrasive teacher that not only his students hate with a passion, but one that gets very little respect from his fellow teaching faculty.  In short, this guy's a ball-buster as far as personalities go.  Oh, he's a brilliant mind in his field, mind you, but he has next to no redeeming social skills whatsoever.  And here's the thing - he simply doesn't care about anyone at the academy thinking he's too monstrously tough.  When his boss tells him to be a little more lenient on one poorly performing student (whose father just happens to be a major financial backer of the school), Paul responds with hysterical cruelty and indifference.  "That boy is too dumb to pour piss out of a boot...he's a genuine troglodyte."

THE HOLDOVERS represents the second re-teaming of Payne and Giamatti, who previously made one of the director's greatest films in 2004's SIDEWAYS, which featured Giamatti playing - un-huh - an exceptionally gruff man (in that film's case, an uppity wine connoisseur).  I would argue that Paul is perhaps a whole different kind of insufferable beast.  After all, not only does this man express sheer delight in handing out D's and F's to his students, but he's so riddled with ailments that he almost weaponizes them as a reason for his petty attacks on others.  He suffers from hemorrhoids, Amblyopia (or a lazy eye), a rare genetic condition that makes him (by his own admission) smell like rotting fish, and he's a borderline alcoholic.  He's a mighty a-hole, yes, but he does have his share of problems, which plays into Payne's career playbook of tapping into unsettling characters and portraying them warts and all (this is something you can see play out in films as far-reaching as ELECTION to THE DESCENDANTS to NEBRASKA to SIDEWAYS).  However, the one thing that Payne does with surgical precision - and better than most other filmmakers - is provide a seething level of condemnation for his twisted personas while showing equal levels of compassion for them.  That's a tricky dichotomy to pull off, and even though the characters that occupy THE HOLDOVERS are all deeply flawed and eccentrically odd in their own ways (and broken down by life), I don't think Payne mean-spiritedly looks down on them.  Even when this film feels like it somewhat wallows in formulaic territory, Payne enriches it with a freshness and honesty that helps separate itself apart from other lesser genre efforts. 

It's also abundantly clear from the opening frame that (a) Payne is trying to make THE HOLDOVERS look and feel like it was shot in the 1970s because (b) it's actually set in 1970.  We get an opening retro-looking main title sequence with obligatory studio logos that certainly does make the film look like it came out 40-plus years ago, complete with a grainy and flawed visual sheen (which was probably the product of using old school cameras and some modern post-production digital tinkering).  What's superb here is that we get an immediate evocation of time and place as the story gets settled in the comings and goings of its characters at Barton Academy.  As the film opens, 1970 is coming to a quick close and the students themselves are gearing up for some much needed holidays and time away from their cramped and stressed prep school days.  Seemingly everyone is heading back home for Christmas, except for poor Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, a remarkable new find), who is being forced against his will to stay back at the academy because his mother and new stepfather have decided to go on a ski vacation without him.  That really blows, but what blows worse is the fact that he cannot stay at the academy unchaperoned, which means that - you got it! - Mr. Hunham himself will be staying behind to babysit Angus and the other "holdover students" over the Christmas break.  Not only does Paul lack enthusiasm for his current assignment, but Angus, in turn, thinks his teacher to be more of a prison warden ("I thought all the Nazis were hiding in Argentina!"). The other notable person left on campus is Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Rudolph), who's a loyal campus cook suffering from grief over losing her son while he was in combat in Vietnam. 

The arc of these three unfortunate lost souls spending any amount of time together builds to certain unavoidable outcomes.  Like, for example, overcoming their respective differences and hostilities to one another to form an impromptu family unit that grows to value the company they share and the multitude of small life lessons they all learn in the process.  On paper, this seems like pretty conventional Christmas-themed storytelling, and many of the spirited misadventures that Payne and screenwriter David Hemingson set this trio on (both at and outside of school) traverses how they grow to learn each other's secrets and what truly makes them tick.  I think in a lesser filmmaker's hands, THE HOLDOVERS would have approached sitcom levels of contrived setups and payoffs, but Payne is way too bitterly candid with his characters for that kind of discourse.  He doesn't treat any of these people as walking and talking cliché factories.  There's an inherent richness to his examination of these wounded people that try - as they may - to build up nearly impenetrable emotional walls to keep each other at bay, but slowly and surely let them down in an collective effort to be more empathetic.    

And the thematic undercurrent to THE HOLDOVERS is quite complex despite the otherwise understated and low key approach that Payne utilizes here.  There are some obvious class struggles displayed in the film, especially when it comes to some of the more boneheaded students at the academy having a place there that's born more out of their family's social status in the community versus the kid's academic prowess.  Then there's the deeply sad arc of Mary having her son being essentially forced against his will to be drafted into a war when more privileged white kids feel more guarded and above being forced into duty (Randolph is quietly heartbreaking playing a character dealing with tragic loss and whole trying to process a racial playing field that's anything but level in the time she resides in).  THE HOLDOVERS isn't aggressively sermonizing its themes of racial and class divide, though, but expertly weaves them into the larger fabric (and main narrative thread) of a deeply pig-headed and thoroughly dislikable man in Paul coming to grips with who he is, how he could change, and how he can positively influence young Angus, who's dealing with his own emotional devastation of parental abandonment.  We get conflict and road blocks along the way, but Payne thankfully never goes the way of making these relationships feel too saccharine and melodramatic for their own good.  I'm willing to forgive the simplicity of this film's overall story execution when it comes to Payne's nuanced treatment of all of these disturbed personalities.    

To be fair, Giamatti can play loveable SOBs in his proverbial sleep, which may have many complaining that playing Paul is no real stretch for the actor.  But Paul is not a one-note copycat of the similar character in SIDEWAYS.   He's perhaps an even bigger intellectual snob who outwardly hates just about anyone that he feels is not his mental equal (basically...everyone...making him an equal opportunity hate-monger).  But he's also a sad sack that has been cheated in life in more ways than one, and Giamatti is brilliant here for playing not only this man's irrepressibleness while subtly relaying him as a deeply lonely man that's friendless and family-less and has had life deal him up a rotten set of cards.  You kind of want to slap and hug him in equal measure, which makes Giamatti's performance dynamics even more astounding.  He's matched exceptionally well by the young rookie Sessa (who has next to no major screen credits to his name), who perhaps has the toughest and thorniest acting assignment of being able to hold his own and stand toe to toe with the larger than life presence of Giamatti and make his evolving relationship with Paul feel all the more organic derived and earned.  The odd couple energy and chemistry that both actors maintain throughout THE HOLDOVERS becomes more infectious by the minute.  

The best way that I can describe this film - in closing - is that watching it felt like me putting on my favorite cozy wool sweater that I just re-discovered after feeling it was lost years ago.  That's a wonderful feeling.  THE HOLDOVERS is a wonderful entertainment and easily represents Payne triumphantly returning to form after his highly ambitious, but highly problematic and misguided sci-fi social satire DOWNSIZING in 2017.  Reuniting himself with his SIDEWAYS actor was probably a shrewd move for Payne, seeing as that's easily both of their most beloved films.  Witnessing them re-team here will hit many of that film's fans right in the nostalgic feels.  It was sublime to see this on-screen marriage again, but it was also reassuring to witness Payne return to the masterful little character-driven studies of his best earlier films that mixed uproarious laughs and heart-rending sentiment in equal measure.  And what a joy it is to have Giamatti fully in his element playing a brutal misanthrope with such relish, which is obviously complimented by Payne's observant directorial eye and Hemingson's scathingly sharp dialogue.  When Paul insults, it just cuts so hysterically deep and is vulgarly poetic.  At one point, he informs one of his victims, "I have the requisite experience and insight to aver that you are and always have been penis cancer in human form."