The great Christmas film of 2023 arrives unseasonably late, deep into January, like a drunken carouser who has lost track of the time. The Holdovers is a scratchy human drama, set in a mothballed boys’ boarding school and circling a sad, lopsided Norwegian spruce. The message of festive good cheer, such as it is, comes delivered by Paul Giamatti in the role of a cantankerous classics teacher. “I find the world a bitter and complicated place,” he declares. “And it seems to feel the same way about me.”
The film’s director, Alexander Payne, has never suffered a Christmas as lonesome as the one in The Holdovers. But a few occasions have come close; his 60th birthday springs to mind. “I was having to isolate because I had Covid,” he says. “So I was all alone in my apartment. Friends would bring food and leave it by my door.” But on balance, he says, the landmark big day could have been a lot worse.
