The Holdovers Review: A Delightful Throwback
Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic
Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti collaborated for the critically acclaimed Sideways in 2004. Nearly 20 years later, they have teamed up again for The Holdovers, a film starting to garner critical praise and recognition as one of the year’s best as awards season ramps up.
Made to look and feel like a classic 70s film, The Holdovers is set during a Christmas break at a New England boarding school named Barton in 1970. Classical history professor Paul Hunham (Giamatti), the campus curmudgeon, is put in the unenviable position of having to look after the holdovers on campus, the students who are unable to get home to their families during the break and must stay on campus. One of these students is Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), whose mother informs him at the last minute that she and his stepfather will take the holidays as their belated honeymoon. Also stuck on campus with them is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the head of the school cafeteria who recently lost her son in Vietnam.
Hunham is the classic by-the-book teacher, disliked by most students and someone who wears their dislike of him as a badge of honor. He thinks his strictness is exactly what all his students need and refuses to modulate despite the appeals of the school’s dean, himself a former student of Hunham. An early scene shows him returning tests to his students, many of whom failed or nearly failed, and the highest grade, a B+, is given to Angus.
He has essentially cloistered himself in this remote private school for reasons later explained in the film. Hunham also has a lazy eye and smells of fish, a condition called trimethylaminuria, which leads to the students making fun of him.
Halfway through watching the film, I started questioning whether Paul Giamatti had always had a lazy eye, and I was just now noticing it, but he does not. Also, I think they kept switching which eye it was. I have no idea how they did this little trick, and I want to keep the magic a mystery.
Angus has a familiar coming-of-age narrative. As the B+ from the notoriously hard grader Hunham shows, he is a smart student. But he has an antagonistic relationship with several classmates, and it is revealed that Barton is his last chance and he will be sent to military school if he screws up this opportunity.
Mary’s story is heartbreaking, losing her son and experiencing her first Christmas without him. Holidays can often be tough for many people, and while all three of these characters can lay claim to that, it hits hardest with Mary. But she is also the warm, beating heart of this film. She can relate to Angus and him having to experience Christmas apart from his family, temporary as his situation may be. She also humanizes Hunham so that he loosens up as the break progresses.
These three people create their own unconventional holiday family, bonding through circumstance and necessity and being the support they need. Things are confrontational and antagonistic between Hunham and Angus until an emergency trip to the ER allows them to start seeing each other as an actual person and not a student and teacher, respectively.
That’s not to say that the film is dour and serious; far from it. It is a heartwarming comedy that has heart and empathy for the characters.
Paul Giamatti has long been recognized as a great actor, and this is one of his finest performances. He perfectly embodies Hunham as a character who is a little tragic but also a little laughable in how much he clings to his authority as a professor.
It also becomes clear that this is a wall of self-defense he has built up for himself, and Giamatti excels at showing the humanity underneath the façade. At one point, he recounts a desire to write a monograph, unsure he has a full book inside him, and Mary replies, empathetically, “You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?”
Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Mary is, simply put, one of my favorite supporting performances of the year. Mary is a no-nonsense person in the kitchen and in dealing with people like Hunham and the students at Barton. But she also knows how to correct and instruct in a firm but gentle manner and when to show grace and compassion. It is easy to see what kind of parent she was to her recently deceased son.
As Angus, Dominic Sessa gives an impressive debut performance in a coming-of-age role. Angus is a familiar character, a talented but troubled teen with an unfamiliar backstory and an unlikely mentor in Hunham. He desperately needs a positive male role model in his life, a need ignored by his family, school, and Hunham until he gets into a one-on-one setting with them.
The Holdovers is designed to look and feel like an artifact of a bygone era of Hollywood. Indeed, it is the kind of film that doesn’t get made as much and has difficulty finding an audience at the movie theater. But it is worth seeking out.
It is a wonderful mix of comedy and drama with heart and empathy. Here’s hoping it generates some award buzz because it has earned it.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars