The Holdovers review: A warm reunion for Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti

Don’t let the wintry backdrop of Alexander Payne’s latest fool you, for The Holdovers is a warm honeyed cider of a film. That’s no mean feat considering the holiday-set comedy-drama is anchored by a crotchety instructor at a New England prep school with a habit of calling his students “rancid philistines” and who is tasked with looking over the students who have nowhere to go during the winter break of 1970. But beneath the prickly exterior of its central character (played by Sideways’ Paul Giamatti) is an unwaveringly gentle film about the very need for that gentleness—with others and, perhaps more importantly, with ourselves.

From the ’70s-styled title cards for Focus Features and Miramax that open the film, Payne envelops you in the postcard-ready winter at Barton. The all-boys boarding school where young men from affluent families go on their way to Yale, Harvard, Cornell, and the like is, according to Giamatti’s Paul Hunham, a breeding ground for entitled brats in dire need of being put in their place. And that’s what he relishes doing in his Ancient Civilizations class, where his pedagogical approach is a blend of condescension and disdain. With no social life to speak of and utter contempt for the students he’s surrounded by on campus, Paul is both the best and last choice to play chaperone to the quartet of Barton boys who, for varying reasons, have no Christmas plans to speak of. Joining them as well is Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, in his feature debut), who is left adrift at Barton at the last minute by a mother who’s all too eager to start her life afresh with her rich new husband, sparing little sympathy for the son she’s stranding in the process.

The start of the film alternates between lovely vignettes that give us a glimpse into the Barton world Angus and Paul both ill-fittingly call home (the school choir rehearsing, a somber holiday mass) and somewhat clunky expository scenes where we learn not just about Angus’ family but also about how the school’s head cook, Mary (the luminous Da’Vine Joy Randolph), lost her son in Vietnam. Its first third also focuses on how the many boys and men who populate Barton are, to use a word the film returns to time and again, assholes. Angus’ classmate Teddy Kountze (Brady Hefner) thrives on bullying, while Angus himself, clearly wounded by his mother’s cold shoulder, enjoys berating others and having an all-around foul attitude wherever he goes; and that’s nothing compared to how Paul opts to run the holiday break at Barton, staging it like a long-drawn-out detention where little room is made for fun or amusement. “Adversity breeds character!” is a mantra he all but inflicts on others, a lesson he’s learned the hard way, perhaps.