The Holdovers

dir: Alexander Payne

2023

It almost feels like director Alexander Payne and lead actor Paul Giamatti are coasting. Playing to their strengths, working with very familiar scenarios, and putting people in positions that feel like we’ve watched the flick (a long time ago) many times before.

It shouldn’t work, even down to a use of folk music where I wondered aloud “could they not afford a Cat Stevens song for this scene?”, only to have a Cat Stevens song start playing immediately thereafter.

But it did all work for me. It worked beautifully.

It might be set at a posh New England boys school over Christmas, 1970. It might have an intro with old timey studio titles and the (digital effect) of dust and dropouts on the “film” as it starts, but this is a film as old as time itself. It’s about lonely people struggling with grief and loss, finding it very hard to get by in life, forced together by circumstance, in order to learn things about themselves, and come to terms with things.

You know, like every movie that’s ever been made.

However familiar elements might be, it’s still a very strong film. Paul Giamatti playing a curmudgeon? Say it ain’t so! A sassy, straight-talking service industry African-American character who cuts through the privilege and pieties of the main (white) characters? A troubled teen who’s rebelling without really knowing what he’s rebelling against?

I mean…, you could have called it Catcher in the Rye Ice Storm at the Dead Poet’s Society, and only a few people would have batted an eyelid.

If there is a main character who is not Paul Giamatti, it’s Holden, sorry, Angus (Domenic Sessa), whose parents don’t want to see him during the Christmas break. That’s got to hurt. Still, if Angus was the kind of go along to get along chap, one who could make the best of a dire situation, well, he probably wouldn’t be in this predicament if he was a different person. Instead, he’s an isolated jerk who thinks he’s better than everyone else.

There are other boys in this unfortunate circumstance as well, it’s not just Angus, but he doesn’t really have the social skills to connect with them, or seemingly the desire to.

Charged with looking after these unwanted, misfit toys is a teacher who doesn’t really have anything better to do over the Christmas break: Mr Hunham (Paul Giamatti). He is as loathed by the students as he is by most of the faculty, and he has no life outside of the school.

He hates the students and sees the world as one that hasn’t really improved that much since the Visigoths sacked Rome all those years ago. He teaches ancient history, which means Greek and Roman history, and as such thinks their wisdom is the only wisdom worth learning or repeating.

He routinely fails his students if they don’t work hard. This is a problem at a prestigious school like Barton. People pay to have their worthless sons educated at this school, with the understanding that however dumb they are and however little they work, the pipeline will take them to the Ivy League and then some executive position in an old money firm.

Mr Hunham doesn’t play that bullshit. He doesn’t care about the school’s endowment, or politics, or anything, really. It’s not fair to say that he is exacting but principled: He clearly hates these privileged scions and their born-to-rule mentality, and enjoys being a minor life obstacle to them before they still somehow fail up the ladder of the establishment.

But not all the children there are so lucky. Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) is the head cook at the school, and she had a son that got to be educated at Barton. But when it came to college, they couldn’t afford it, so off to Vietnam he went to die for king (Nixon) and country.

To say that Mary is bereft is an understatement. She still gives her job 100 per cent, but her heart is broken, and it’s a break that nothing can fix. She lost her husband when she was pregnant with Curtis, and then lost her son when he was even younger than the dad. There’s no coming back from that.

Whiskey and shitty reality television helps. The 1970s version of this is watching The Dating Game, but even in that she can peer deeply into the foibles and foolishness of the human condition.

She and Hunham clearly only have alcoholism in common, but he at least, despite being so rude to everyone else, sees some merit in treating her like she’s a human being. She, conversely, has no need to placate or kowtow to Hunham, calling out his bullshit or marvelling at the terribleness of his decision making. She forces Hunham to confront his own failings not solely as a teacher, or a in loco parentis, but as a basic human being lacking in basic humanity.

The main triumvirate of the movie is Hunham, May and Angus, but that pretends that there aren’t other people on the periphery, just out of reach. They are all out there, but these are the three people stuck together. They don’t really grow to understand each other better, or appreciate each other more, or do anything, really. Angus remains abrasive and self-destructive; Mary will never move on from her grief, because how could she, and Hunham, well, he’s part of the furniture at Barton. If he could change he would have decades ago. And nothing now will prompt to change, will it?

Well, maybe something might. The love of a good woman? That possibility is dangled in front of him and us in a way that, if you didn’t know exactly what was going to happen at that moment, well, you have not seen enough Alexander Payne movies or enough movies in general. No terrible man, middle-aged or otherwise, has ever been “saved” by the love of a good man or woman; at best they mask some of their awfulness for a while before it flows back in at full force.

So if a bitter and embittered Hunham has seen life pass him by, and all his opportunities have faded away to nothing, what is he left with? Well, he can try and do the bare minimum to save a kid in a dire circumstance when there was no-one to save Hunham at a similar critical point in his youth.

Of course we take Giamatti for granted, assuming he can play characters like this easily and even in his sleep. And while his other most famous role in one of Payne’s earlier films was playing another acerbic, prickly, self-centred jerk (being Sideways), the two roles couldn’t be more different. And this character of Paul Hunham feels like a real, lived-in character, no matter how absurd he really is. Defect upon defect, for which there are often medical explanations, pile up in a way that is beyond comical.

But it’s not only that (which is played more for humour rather than character-building). He is rigid and authoritarian when it suits him, but the ethos and the example of the philosophers of the past, the Stoics and others (he routinely hands out copies of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, which is just so funny to me) means he believes in these principles that others pay lip-service to.

This is mostly a comedic flick, but there is deep sadness underpinning all of these main characters, which is why the flick, despite or because of its setting, is more than just an exercise in period nostalgia. Also, none of their problems will go away with a montage or a deus ex machina, and they will have to go on living with all of their issues and tragedies still in place.

I think the young guy who plays Angus more than holds his own against two heavyweights like Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, the latter of which will definitely be nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards next year, because these roles are written specifically with that goal in mind. Why “supporting actress” and not “best actress”?

Well, sure, I wonder why as well.

I think everyone involved does great work, and I applaud Alexander Payne’s career-long determination to make films that show what messy fuckers we humans all are, but with enough sympathy to not make us all look completely lost beyond all redemption.

We’re awful, but sometimes we do the right or wrong thing, for a good reason, which is to help where we can, when we can, no matter the cost.

The Holdovers. The feel-good-miserable movie of the Christmas season.

8 times to alcohol – the cause of and solution to all our misery over the Christmas break out of 10

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“I find the world a bitter and complicated place. And it seems to feel the same way about me. You and I have that in common, I think.” - The Holdovers