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.
