Who doesn't get a little sad at Christmastime? Though it's often called "the most wonderful time of the year", Christmas can also be a challenging experience. There are often toxic relatives you've got to deal with at parties. The emphasis on "unity" and "togetherness" in all those billboards or holiday-themed passages can exacerbate your loneliness. Plus, the holidays coinciding with the end of the year can lend an innately wistful reflective quality to one's mind at the end of December. Thoughts can turn to looking back on the preceding 12 months and contemplating the future rather than living in the Yuletide joy of the moment. The end of the year can be a tricky thing to navigate. The Holdovers, a new film from director Alexander Payne, fully runs into those hurdles to make a bittersweet Christmas movie that's also oddly comforting. Any reminders that one isn't alone in experiencing severe emotional problems can be unexpectedly reassuring despite the heavy subject matters being broached.
The Holdovers focuses on Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a legendarily stern teacher at the prestigious school Barton Academy. Nobody on the campus, across the teachers and students, likes this curmudgeon who prefers to spend his days hidden away in this school rather than exploring the wider world. Screenwriter David Hemingson (impressively making his feature film screenwriting debut here) makes the wise decision to establish Hunham's crankiness in a fashion that establishes the character's abrasiveness without totally alienating viewers. We see this man's off-putting personality on full display in his interactions with his students, but most of those students are rich male jerks. Having a teacher (a job that notoriously pays little) wielding a little power against these nepo babies isn't exactly "noble" behavior, but it's also a very entertaining way to cement Hunham as an unlikeable soul. Rather than going the expected route of showing Hunham as "bad" by being explicitly ableist, homophobic, or racist, The Holdovers opts to make him more complicated. His grievances against these wealthy kids are somewhat warranted, it's just his way of communicating those frustrations (and his unwillingness to let anybody in emotionally) is deeply flawed.
After making it clear that we're watching a very detached academic soul living as a shell of himself, The Holdovers proceeds to its central conflict. Hunham is spending the final weeks of December watching over students who have nowhere to go for the holidays. Eventually, he only has one such student to look over: Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a kid who's not quite a jock, nerd, or any other easy High School archetype. He's just messy (Tully has so many family issues) and is unwilling to roll over for Hunham. Also on the campus? The head of Barton Academy cafeteria, Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph). She gets along nicely with Hunham and is grieving the recent death of her son in Vietnam.
What if The Browning Version was directed by Hal Ashby? It'd look a lot like The Holdovers, which is a compliment. This Payne feature can't hit the highs of Version or Ashby's greatest movies, but leaning so much on cinematic magic of the past leads to The Holdovers scoring its own cinematic highs. For starters, the entire motion picture is a three-hander acting exercise between Giamatti, Sessa, and Randolph, and on that front, it's an exceptional experience. It's so good to see Giamatti in a major motion picture again and his skillful work at making Hunham so unabashedly irascible is consistently engrossing. There's a believable level of authority to Giamatti's line deliveries and physicality, but also a sadness beneath those expressive eyes that exude vulnerability even in the character's most unlikeable moments. Meanwhile, Dominic Sessa is an incredible find in his acting debut as Angus Tully. I especially liked the messy way he portrays a teenager navigating emotional quandaries beyond his years. There's such an authenticity to Sessa's depiction of Tully in turmoil that you feel like you're watching an actual teenager out of their depth rather than a cozy cinematic depiction of people in that age range.
As for Da'Vine Joy Randolph, well, those of us who watched Dolemite is My Name four years ago always knew she has incredible chops as an actor. She's absolutely riveting here on all fronts, including her terrific chemistry with both Giamatti and Sessa. Especially unforgettable is a key dialogue-free scene involving Lamb visiting her sister's house. Randolph doesn't need words to grip your eyeballs, she proves captivating so effortlessly. She and the other actors here are framed through a visual sensibility established by Payne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld that's meant to make The Holdovers look like a movie that would've been produced in the early 1970s (the era in which the story takes place). I wish more of the second half of The Holdovers leaned into interesting visual flourishes rooted in the filmmaking norms of this decade, but there's still an engaging and cozy lived-in quality to its imagery that's hard to resist. Extra bonus points too for how The Holdovers was captured with digital cameras, yet various post-production processes gave it all the delightful imperfections (like film grain) of something shot on 35mm. Some movies that go down this road of shooting digitally and then adding in the 35mm visual qualities later just look strange, but The Holdovers totally fooled me into thinking it was shot on vintage Kodak film.
Payne and Hemingson's approach to The Holdovers doesn't so much rewrite the book as it does build on cinema's past to make an enjoyable and effectively melancholy new feature. That's perfectly fine by me when the final product is both actually engaging to watch and such a drastic improvement on Payne's last movie, Downsizing. Keeping the scope of this story so intimate doesn't just let one appreciate the outstanding trio of performances anchoring The Holdovers. It also gets you so comfortable with these characters that even the most conceptually schmaltzy moments in the third act feel totally earned. What a nice gift for the holidays to see a feature like The Holdovers handle that sort of material so nicely.
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