A cantankerous, unpopular teacher, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti); a bright, abrasive student, Angus (Dominic Sessa); and Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s head cook and a recently bereaved mother, find themselves forced to spend the winter holiday together in an otherwise empty New England elite academy in Alexander Payne’s terrific, bittersweet throwback to the classic American cinema of the 1970s. It’s Payne’s finest film since Sideways (2004), and like it features a superb Giamatti performance as a stubbornly unlovable and difficult man. A Christmas movie, complete with an atmospheric dusting of snow and a selection of fussy a cappella school-choir carols, it’s about finding family where you least expect it. But don’t approach The Holdovers expecting a cosy comfort blanket of a film. There’s a bracingly astringent bleakness under its surface layer of melancholy humour; a biting, sharp edge that counters the occasional lurch towards sentimentality.
The kinship with Sideways extends beyond the casting of Giamatti. Tellingly, both Paul in The Holdovers and Miles in Sideways are defined as much by what they haven’t done – both men are burdened by albatross-like unwritten book projects – as what they have achieved in life. There is arguably no director currently working who has a better grasp of the framework of disappointment than Payne. His characters inhabit richly drawn worlds in which seemingly minor details come together in a reproachful chorus, a reminder that life could, and should, have been better. A case in point: a shot of a tube of Preparation H haemorrhoid ointment casually on display in the bathroom of Paul’s private quarters at the school tells us more than the fact that he suffers from piles – it also suggests a barren social life. Paul has long ago given up on the possibility of spontaneous visitors.
Disappointment is the driving force behind Miles’s thin-skinned wine snobbery in Sideways; disappointment, with a side order of delusion, fuels Warren Schmidt’s camper-van voyage of self-discovery in About Schmidt. And it’s this shared experience of being let down by life, as much as the fact that they’re forced to spend the Christmas break together, that connects the characters in The Holdovers, helping them to tune into the unique frequencies of each other’s pain.
Paul has more or less accepted the fact that he is disliked by students and fellow teachers alike and has built a wall of books and barbed put-downs to hide behind. For Angus, already grieving the absence of his father in his life, the last-minute retraction of a promised holiday to Saint Kitts with his mother and her new husband has wounded him deeply – a fact that he tries and fails to hide behind a fusillade of adolescent sarcasm. But Mary’s plight is the rawest, something that Randolph captures brilliantly in the weary dignity of her character’s slow, achingly deliberate movements (she’s a deserved winner of this year’s Golden Globe for best supporting actress and a frontrunner to take the Oscar).
Mary, we learn, only took the job cooking for privileged rich kids who look down on her for her race and class so that her son could attend the school. But while his graduating classmates sailed into university places, her son was forced to serve in the army and was killed in Vietnam. Now every day at work is a reminder of what she has lost, and the prospect of her first Christmas without her child is paralysing. It’s no wonder that she numbs her pain with bourbon every night.
This is Payne’s first period film – the story unfolds over the tail end of 1970 and the beginning of 1971 – and he embraces the era fully, with a retro feel to the design and look of the picture that extends to using vintage production logos in the opening credits. The very specific spirit of 70s American cinema and its idiosyncratic character-driven film-making is evident throughout, not least in writer David Hemingson’s sharp, sophisticated screenplay.
The crisp dialogue is a masterclass in capturing character voices – Paul, for example, has a seemingly bottomless well of insults for his students: they are “rancid little philistines” or “hormonal vulgarians”. Words fail him, however, when he’s confronted with kindness: he practically slams the door in the face of a co-worker who presents him with the gift of Christmas cookies. But many of the film’s most affecting moments are dialogue-free: a wrenchingly sad shot of Mary carefully folding long-treasured baby clothes, her own dreams for the future mothballed and passed on to her pregnant younger sister. It’s a profoundly poignant moment that acknowledges the weight of disappointment Mary carries, while still permitting a glimmer of hope.
