Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is destined to become a must-watch Christmas mainstay with all the reflective poignancy of It’s A Wonderful Life, the youthful charm and humour of A Christmas Story, and the claustrophobic vibes of Die Hard.
Payne, a master of cultivating authenticity in his films through iconic characters like Tracy Flick in Election, the Grant family in Nebraska, and Miles and Jack in Sideways, turns up the film grain and turns down the heat to build the feeling of chilly isolation in The Holdovers. The story centres three characters – Paul Giamatti’s Professor Paul “Walleye” Hunham, newcomer Dominic Sessa’s Angus Tully, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Mary Lamb. Each find themselves unwittingly stranded in stuffy prep school Barton Academy over the Christmas break, with none having anywhere else to go.
The Barton Academy – both as building and as institution – looms large over The Holdovers and its characters. Its reputation as breeding ground for the country’s finest young men, a process meant to incubate and gatekeep wealth and power to all but the sons of the most powerful and wealthy, is engrained in its traditions. So too are its buildings – beautifully-maintained wood concealing what are certainly drafts, letting the cold seep in.
Hunham is charged with overseeing any student holdovers, and his reputation as a privilege-busting, sarcastic hardass precedes him. He’s roundly despised by the Barton population – students and faculty alike – and his attempts at establishing a meritocratic system at Barton and a refusal to turn a blind eye to any of his entitled students academic shortcomings (no matter how many wings or gyms their parents donate to the school) does him no favours. The school’s headmaster in particular is fiercely at odds with the principled Hunham, as he too was one of Walleye’s least promising and dimmest pupils.
This year, there’s only a handful of ‘holdovers’, which eventually dwindles to only one – Angus – left in care of chef Mary and Professor Hunham, an unlikely family gathered in the huge Barton mess hall, which seems even more cavernous absent the chaos of the school population. Angus is justifiably bitter over his abandonment by his mother and stepfather, who are having a late honeymoon and are unreachable, even when a classmate whisks the rest of the holdovers away in his father’s helicopter to go skiing.
While the unlikely kinship and bond between Hunham and Tully is certainly the focus of The Holdovers, it’s Mary that most draws me into the world. Mary oversees the cafeteria with a weary authority, and is pointedly one of only two Black characters in both the film and at Barton. She’s taken the job in order to secure a spot for her son Curtis, the only Barton man to enlist and be killed in Vietnam. She mourns quietly, at first, pushing the pain down and into her work, tirelessly and thanklessly serving a group of boys whose destinies are so far removed from her son’s.
Film grain and titles that evoke the 1970’s aside, Payne uses some great music in The Holdovers, including Labi Siffre’s ‘Crying, Laughing, Loving, Lying’ as a bookend to the film. Cat Stevens, Shocking Blue, and other deep cuts help to build the strong sense of place in the film, even while telling a story that feels timeless.
Like the best of holiday films, The Holdovers is fairly undemanding. And that’s not a criticism, either. When the tree’s up, the decorations are already in place, and the last ribbon around the last gift is tied I’m not always looking for the complex subtext of Infinity Pool, the crushing pathos of Oppenheimer, or the bad (but good) violent vibes of When Evil Lurks. I’ve got the other 11 months for that. While The Holdovers might not be a truly feelgood movie, per se, it’s an easy watch that still has resonance and wears its heart and soul on its sleeve. With performances that dig deep into your soul, including a star-making turn for Sessa, The Holdovers is a pitch-perfect holiday film that manages to fill the liminal space between Christmas and New Years.
The Holdovers is currently in theatres and VOD from Universal and Focus Features, with a Blu-ray and DVD release now available.
