If the best picture Oscar was handed out to the film that elicited the warmest collective glow from cinemagoers, bookmakers would have long since stopped accepting bets on The Holdovers. Does anyone anywhere actively dislike Alexander Payne’s boarding school drama? If they do they’re keeping very quiet. It’s a film that, in its dopamine hit of warm nostalgia, seems pretty much backlash proof.
Curiously though, it’s that same quality that, for some, will mean that The Holdovers wouldn’t be a deserving best picture winner. Film history, after all, doesn’t like to reward the feelgood. Think of some of the most celebrated Oscar winners and they tend to be heavy, pessimistic works – The Godfather Part II, The Silence of the Lambs or No Country for Old Men. Similarly, “nice” best picture winners tend to be damned for that niceness – Forrest Gump, say, or more recently Coda. Granted, the Holdovers is a cut above either of those films, but it does seem destined to be pigeonholed as this year’s cheery indie contender in a lineup largely made up of weighty, serious films.
Which seems unfair. Because, for one, there’s just as much skill in crafting something hopeful as something hopeless. And more to the point, The Holdovers is weighty and serious when it wants to be. There’s a pulse of melancholy quietly throbbing away throughout, in a film that in its gentle, unhurried way wrestles with knotty themes – class, race, grief and the inertia it causes. That it manages to do this while doubling up as the most cheering of Christmas movies is all the more impressive.
The Holdovers maintains a tradition kept by the best Christmas movies: of having its characters regard the season with complete dread. For Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), Barton Academy’s fusty, uncharitable classics teacher, it’s a time of obligation, tasked as he is with supervising the students “held over” – abandoned by their families – during the festive break. For problem student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), it is a time synonymous with rejection and boredom – his mum and step-dad have jetted off to Saint Kitts without him, and Hunham has mandated that the break will be filled with study and vigorous exercise (“the Romans bathed naked in the freezing Tiber. Adversity builds character, Mr Tully”). And for cafeteria manager Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), it is a period painfully marked by the absence of her son Curtis, a former Barton scholarship student who, lacking the blue-blood connections needed to avoid the draft, fought and died in the Vietnam war.
That this misfit trio will, by the end of the film, form their own unorthodox family is inevitable, but Payne has fun taking the scenic route. There are caperish detours into emergency rooms and dive bars, and an extended Salinger-ish trip to Boston. But he revels in the gaps between these set pieces too. So often the film swerves big, obvious flashes of drama in favour of smaller and more telling moments – such as the scene where Hunham spots some antidepressant pills Angus is keen to keep hidden, and rather than having some laboured “it’s OK to be not OK” monologue, gives a small knowing glance towards his own antidepressants tucked away in his wash bag.
A film so reliant on little, crucial gestures needs an ensemble good enough to pull them off, and The Holdovers’ central trio are certainly that. Giamatti, reuniting with Payne for the first time since Sideways, channels the same thwarted energy as his character in that film – but with just a hint of sweetness at the margins. He’s supported brilliantly by Sessa, a first time screen actor who inhabits the role of callow, self-destructive but caring Angus so well it’s almost eerie, and Randolph – the only one of the trio likely to win anything on Oscar night – who takes a role so suffused in pain that it could be overwhelming and turns in a performance full of warmth and wit.
This is only the second film (after Nebraska) that Payne has directed without also writing, and that might explain why it’s less astringent than his earlier ones. He still has the capacity to spike the punch with vinegar though, from the moments of casual cruelty between boarders to a gnarly scene where a dislocated shoulder is popped vividly back into place. Likewise, he has never before made a period piece – though even his contemporary films often feel preserved in aspic. There’s a worry, on seeing The Holdovers’ opening title cards with their retro takes on studio logos, that Payne might have fallen too deep into the rabbit hole of faithful reproduction, spending months sourcing era-accurate exercise books rather than locating his film’s beating heart.
But actually the period setting seems to free Payne to scuff things up. It’s striking that the film spends much of its time not in Barton’s pristine, lacquered hallways but in the guts of the school – the kitchens and cramped, pipe-lined corridors. Haemorrhoid cream in the bathroom, the soiled dorm cots, Hunham’s much-commented on fishy aroma – at every opportunity, Payne lingers on the messy and the real.
All this means that when the film does show a sentimental streak in its final moments, it feels earned – and completely irresistible. It’s highly unlikely that The Holdovers will win best picture but it might be the nominee we keep returning to, again and again.
• This article was amended on 7 March 2024. A previous version referenced a trip to Chicago, when Boston was meant.
