The Holdovers Is a Cozy ’70s Throwback With One Big Difference

The Holdovers, the melancholy-yet-lovable eighth film from director Alexander Payne, reunites him for the first time since 2004’s Sideways with his gruff, sardonic muse, Paul Giamatti. Giamatti, the beloved character actor and unparalleled insult-slinger, plays Paul Hunham, a classics teacher at Barton Academy, a Massachusetts boarding school for boys where he himself was once a brilliant but unpopular student. Now a washed-up writer with a poorly disguised drinking problem, Paul is even more unpopular as a faculty member, a stickler and a pedant whose sole joy in life seems to come from the extravagant putdowns he invents for his students, “fetid layabouts” and “snarling Visigoths” that they are.

As punishment for refusing a legacy student his gentleman’s C, Paul is saddled with the undesirable task of staying at school over the 1970–71 winter break to watch “the holdovers,” a handful of kids who, for various reasons, can’t go home for the holidays.* He has just settled the boys into an unpleasant routine of all-day studying broken up by gloomy group meals and begrudging walks in the snow when the super-wealthy father of one left-behind student arranges to have the boys airlifted by helicopter to a fancy ski vacation. Only one can’t reach his parents for permission in time to join the excursion: Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a lanky wiseass whose ready comebacks hint that he’s a brighter-than-average troublemaker, one who likely earned his expulsions from the many boarding schools he was kicked out of before landing at Barton. Stranded on campus with them is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s cook, who’s about to spend her first Christmas without her son, a Barton graduate killed in combat in Vietnam.

It will come as a shock to precisely no one that these three lost souls trapped together in the snow eventually form an unlikely three-way friendship. But the pleasure the viewer feels in watching The Holdovers bring about that familiar outcome—a plot structure common to holiday movies and rom-coms since time immemorial—is born not of surprise, but of familiarity itself. For all its cutting dialogue and its initially off-putting protagonist, The Holdovers is a cozy cardigan of a movie. Its wintry atmosphere and lonely, bookish anti-hero at times recall Marielle Heller’s 2018 comedy Can You Ever Forgive Me? The movies The Holdovers most sets out to resemble, though, are not of such recent vintage. The film’s retro look (the soft-edged 35mm cinematography comes courtesy of director of photography Eigil Bryld) is explicitly indebted to 1970s classics like Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude, Peter Bogdanovich’s Paper Moon, or Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (which two characters watch together in a theater at one point).* Even the sound is vintage-styled, mixed in mono rather than stereo—a detail I didn’t consciously register upon viewing, but that may account for the déjà vu effect the whole film had on me, as if I were sitting in one of the cigarette-smoke-scented two-screen movie theaters of my earliest cinematic memories.

The Holdovers marks Payne’s first time making a period film, though his taste for character-driven social satire (Election, Citizen Ruth, About Schmidt) places the movie squarely in his wheelhouse. It’s also only the second time in Payne’s career (after Nebraska) that he’s directed a movie whose screenplay he didn’t write or co-write. Instead, Payne more or less commissioned a script from longtime TV scribe David Hemingson (Whiskey Cavalier, How I Met Your Mother, Black-ish) after Hemingson approached him about directing a TV script with a related setting. Payne’s recasting of the idea was inspired in part by the 1935 Marcel Pagnol film Merlusse, about a group of boys stranded at school with a martinet of a schoolmaster. Hemingson has said that the character of Paul Hunham was based on an irascible but beloved uncle of his, and a sense of lived experience suffuses the movie. Giamatti’s embittered classics nerd is not a cranky-professor stereotype but a specific, recognizable, frequently enraging man. The setting, too, has a textured specificity to it. Scenes set in parts of the campus that high-school movies seldom show—the kitchen, the staff TV lounge—remind us that, institutional and unwelcoming as it may seem, for these three people at this point in their lives, the school is the closest thing to a home.

It’s no accident that the character Giamatti plays shares his first name: Payne envisioned the actor in the role from the start, and asked Hemingson to write the part with him in mind. In addition to being funny as hell, Giamatti is a brilliant dramatic actor, and he invests his namesake’s withering remarks with a French pastry’s worth of layers. His amusement at his own cleverness barely masks his painful awareness that no one around him finds him funny. His intellectual snobbery is a feeble defense against his deep shame at having never achieved more than becoming a much-loathed teacher at his own high school. Comedic performances are rarely honored come awards time, but a late scene in which Paul runs into an old high-school classmate merits an Oscar nomination all on its own.

Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who all but stole Dolemite Is My Name from no less a comic legend than Eddie Murphy, pulls off the same feat with Giamatti. Their scenes together, especially one where they confide some hard truths in the TV lounge late at night, make use of both their nimble comic timing and their inner warmth. One of the qualities that sets The Holdovers apart from the ’70s movies its style pastiches is the attention paid to the character of Mary, not just as a sassy-comeback delivery system (though she gets in her share of good digs) but as a full human being worthy of our attention and love. I could have wished a storyline in the movie’s last act told us more about her life outside of Barton Academy, but Randolph’s detail-rich performance brings every scene in which Mary appears to vivid life.

Dominic Sessa, a young first-time film actor whom Payne discovered while scouting high schools to use as locations, has a rough-around-the-edges quality that I thought suited his character, a boy whose reflexive sarcasm belies a deep sense of abandonment after a series of family traumas. My viewing companion came out of the movie with a less positive impression of Sessa’s performance, finding this nonprofessional quality a distraction in scenes opposite skilled veterans like Giamatti and Randolph. It would not be the first time that Payne chose a young actor precisely because of their non-Hollywood aura—see Chris Klein and the late, lamented Jessica Campbell, two Midwestern teenagers he cast to great effect in 1999’s Election. All I know is, by the time a late plot twist revealed a previously unknown cause for Angus’ misery, I was fully on board with this funny, angry, lost kid’s journey.

All good Christmas movies understand that Christmas is inherently sad. The season’s insistence on nostalgia, family, and the comfort of home can’t help but invoke their equal and opposite states: bitterness, loneliness, and a sense of displacement. The Holdovers opens with an a cappella school-choir performance of “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” amid picturesque if wistful shots of the Barton Academy campus blanketed in snow. The movie that follows is a kind of retelling of A Christmas Carol, if Scrooge were fixated on Roman Stoic philosophy rather than the business of the counting-house. Payne’s work has been accused in the past of being too chilly, too emotionally removed: The Holdovers will no doubt be faulted by some for being too gooey and sentimental. For me, it stands as a minor if beautifully crafted film in the context of Payne’s entire oeuvre, but a potential classic of the miserable-holiday subgenre. If nothing else, the memory of Paul Giamatti’s bone-dry inflection as he delivers a couple of the movie’s rudest zingers will warm you up like a crackling holiday fire.