Film Review: The Holdovers

5 Stars

By Joseph Beyer | Dec. 16, 2023

Filmmaker Alexander Payne has already delivered audiences one of the more fascinating repertoires in American cinematic satire, with stories from Election to About Schmidt to Citizen Ruth. All of Payne’s works have an almost uncomfortable intimacy that eventually pulls you deeply into the lives of the characters.

Such is the sometimes-brilliant case in his latest project The Holdovers, a showpiece for actor Paul Giamatti that reunites him with the Sideways director for the first time in 20 years. (Both have weathered time well.) Here, they deliver a bittersweet story of generations struggling to understand each other, the possible beginning of the toppling of the ivory towers of academia, and the enduring fallible nature of being human.

As a centerpiece performance, Giamatti plays Professor Paul Hunham, a stalwart of the Barton preparatory school where he does daily battle with the entitled teenage boys he teaches. When a ragtag group of “holdovers” need a chaperone over the holidays while they are stuck on campus, Professor Hunham is given the assignment…much to the dismay of his adolescent strays.

Though it starts out feeling a bit like a Dead Poets Society plot (eccentric teacher vs. impressionable boys), The Holdovers explores new territory and themes in a narrative where “the holdovers” find their exits one by one until a trio of characters is left alone on campus, forced to become a kind of family celebrating the holiday together.

Much of the film works precisely thanks to a perfect chemistry of performances, including newcomer Dominic Sessa as Agnes Tully, the anxious last student left behind by a family that forgot him, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph as the campus cook Mary Lamb, a grieving mother celebrating the first holiday without her son. Both actors are remarkably talented, and together with Giamatti, the trifecta will win you over.

They deal with their aches of individual loneliness with the help of booze, engaging in the pursuit of love, and taking small acts of revenge upon those who’ve grieved them. These characters smoke, drink, and lie from discomfort and shame, and yet somehow emerge as almost heroic as each tries to find in the other a familial love or bond absent from their own lives.

Written by David Hemingson after Payne commissioned him to explore themes inspired by the 1935 film Merlusse, the film is not an adaptation but something very original, woven together by creative adults into a sophisticated story that feels like a great paperback novel. More than an homage to a certain cinematic style, the film seems quite intentionally contemporary—foreshadowing the cultural crises yet to come in a country reckoning with war and violence, social injustices, and a profound loneliness (if any of that sounds familiar).

With a period soundtrack curated masterfully by music supervisor Matt Aberle in collaboration with music editor Richard Ford and composer Mark Orton, The Holdovers is accompanied by music that fills its moments with the feelings of listening to your first LP record with the headphones on.

Running 2 hours and 13 minutes and rated R, The Holdovers is the opposite of a summer blockbuster that arrives just in time for the more contemplative pace of winter.