In a delayed but delightful arrival for the UK’s post-festive season release schedule, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers emerges as this January’s perfect antidote for the winter blues. Offering a genial, gentle, and redemptive story about personal growth, friendship and sacrifice, Payne’s film skilfully navigates the human condition with the Sideway director’s characteristic precision.
The Holdovers reunites Payne with Sideways star Paul Giamatti and features exquisite turns from Da’Vine Joy Randolph (People of Earth, Empire, Rustin) and newcomer Dominic Sessa.
New England, 1970. Paul Hunham (Giamatti), a taciturn Classics teacher has worked at the same exclusive prep school for decades. Disliked by almost everyone at the school for his crotchety exterior and unwillingness to bend the rules, Hunham finds himself on the receiving end of a barely disguised revenge punishment by the school’s long-suffering principle. He is saddled with the task of babysitting a handful of students during the Christmas period, a punishment he’s only too happy to endure seeing as he has nowhere more exciting to be.
Despite all odds, Dunham forms an unlikely friendship with one of his charges. Angus (Sessa), a bright, yet deeply troubled teenager, has been left at the school by his mother and her rich new husband. Together with outspoken school cook Mary (Rudolph), Dunham does his best to make Christmas a special time for the young man. Hilarity and much soul-searching ensue as the trio bonds over their own failures and heartbreaks. The whole thing culminates in an impromptu road trip to Boston where secrets are revealed and painful memories are brought out into the open.
Featuring spiky intergenerational negotiations and intelligent repartee all-round , The Holdovers is often reminiscent of the best parts of Peter Weir’s 1989 heart-breaking coming of age drama Dead Poets Society. But while Weir’s narrative is often laden with clunky, toe-curlingly reductive sentimentality, Payne and screenwriter David Hemingson rely heavily on their own brand of stiff upper lip WASPy rigidity to tell a devastatingly accurate story about love and loss.
Paul Giamatti, in all his cantankerous glory, delivers a career-defining turn in his first leading role for a while. He delivers a pointed and hilariously accurate depiction of a man who has spent a lifetime hiding from his own feelings, only to be revealed as a much more complex individual than even he envisaged himself to be.
The Holdovers emerges as a testament to Payne’s unique storytelling ability, offering a grownup drama for intelligent audiences, inviting a nuanced exploration of the complexities of human relationships against the backdrop of cruel classist rigidity.
