‘The Holdovers’ Review: Alexander Payne’s Return To Form Is An Instant Classic [TIFF]
(L-R) Dominic Sessa, Paul Giamatti, & Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers. Courtesy of Focus Features.
It’s clear from the opening production logos that The Holdovers is a period piece. Not an England-set 15th-century film about monarchs filled with exquisitely over-the-top costumes and sets, but a cozy, familiarly warm film set in the ‘70s about love, loss, and, above all else, human connection. We’re introduced to the New England-adjacent Barton Academy as Damien Jurado’s “Silver Joy” plays — the first of many perfect needle drops — and we take our time familiarizing ourselves with the upper-class boarding school. It’s the kind of place that’s mostly filled with rich, privileged white boys who, not because they don’t know better, are just the worst. The exception among them is Angus Tully (newcomer Dominic Sessa), a held-back grade repeater whose only goal is to not get kicked out of school to avoid being sent to a military academy. The common thread connecting Angus with students like Teddy Kountze (Brady Hepner) is their mutual distaste for their history teacher, Professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti). Hunham is like that one teacher we’ve all had: very old-fashioned, a stickler for playing by the rules and the honor code — a real old-fashioned guy (it helps when you’re a professor of history at the same boarding school you once attended).
Every year at Barton Academy, a small number of kids don’t go home for the holidays. These are the holdovers. Also, every year, an unlucky teacher gets stuck with glorified babysitting duties, and for the winter break of 1970, that teacher is Paul Hunham. It’s a few days in that Teddy’s father arrives via helicopter and scoops him and the other kids up — well, the other kids save for Angus, whose mother was unreachable (she left him behind to take a belated honeymoon with her new husband) — leaving him alone with Mr. Hunham and Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s head cook.
Dominic Sessa & Da’Vine Joy Randolph in The Holdovers. Courtesy of Focus Features.
People often say, “They really don’t make movies like this anymore.” Though 90% of the time, that statement is false — they don’t watch enough of the movies that are released — some films truly feel like they’re pulled out of the past as if they’d been sitting in a vault for the last 50 years. If you told me that The Holdovers is a hidden gem from the ‘70s that no one had ever talked about or seen, I’d believe you. More than just a movie that your parents will love, The Holdovers grounds itself in a story about family, or lack of a family. The three main characters all have holes in their personal lives — Angus lost his father, Mr. Hunham never had a family, and Mary lost her son — that the film uses to tell its story, one about found families and the ways in which we’re drawn to each other when we need it most.
David Hemingson’s script, on its own, is hilarious, full of heart, and packed to the brim with jokes (none of which were improvised, all written in from the get-go). Every scene, character, and plot beat feels necessary, justifying the near two-and-a-quarter-hour runtime. The time we spend just sitting in this environment that Production Designer Ryan Warren Smith created is meaningful, helping us feel at home in these locations, aided by Eigil Bryld’s cinematography, which comes off as a cross between home video and theatrical release, prioritizing longer takes over rapid cuts. All of this is to address the pacing, which is perfect at times while dragging at others, attributed to the slightly overlong running time.
Alexander Payne’s direction is sharp — solidifying the fact that 2017’s Downsizing was a rare misstep from the Nebraska and Sideways filmmaker — as he carefully curates the world in which the film takes place from the biggest of things (sets, camera angles, use of music) to the most minute details like the mono-track audio mix that has randomly inserted cuts and scratches. It’s clear that Payne didn’t want to make an homage to the films of the 1970s, instead opting to make one of his own.
Dominic Sessa & Paul Giamatti in The Holdovers. Courtesy of Focus Features.
With veteran actors going tête-à-tête with newcomers, one would expect a disparity between them, but that may be the furthest thing from the truth in the case of The Holdovers. You’ll hear endless deserved raves about Paul Giamatti’s leading turn — the man’s control over his eyeballs is quite baffling — as the prickly professor. He’s able to win over the audience in the opening minutes even though he’s making fun of children and calling them names like “Snarling Visigoths.” The man has truly never been better. Da’Vine Joy Randolph is excellent as a grieving mother who tugs on our heartstrings, though she’s given considerably less to chew on than Giamatti and Sessa. Speaking of, the fact that this is Dominic Sessa’s first onscreen performance is hard to believe. He exudes charm and charisma, though he has a slightly harder time with the more dramatic moments.
It’s easy to find a throughline in the different parts of The Holdovers. Maybe it’s because the filmmakers want us to quickly grasp the film’s core themes, or maybe it’s because it feels like the kind of movie we’ve seen a thousand times before and loved on each watch. It’s destined for future-classic status and will undoubtedly be a new addition to the “Annual Christmas Watch Lineup” for many (Focus, why are you releasing this in early November?).
