Year: 2023
Country: USA
Language: English, Latin
Genre: Comedy, Drama
Director: Alexander Payne
Screenwriter: David Hemingson
Music: Mark Orton
Cinematography: Eigil Bryld
Editor: Kevin Tent
Cast:
Paul Giamatti
Dominic Sessa
Da’Vine Joy Randolph
Carrie Preston
Brady Hepner
Ian Dolley
Jim Kaplan
Michael Provost
Naheem Garcia
Andrew Garman
Stephen Thorne
Gillian Vigman
Tate Donovan
Darby Lee-Stack
Alexander Cook
Rating: 7.9/10
Rallying from the first major blowback in his esteemed filmmaking career, e.g. the high-budgeted, ecosophical sci-fi microcosm DOWNSIZING, Alexander Payne astutely reverts to a bygone era to concoct a crowd-pleaser with massive appeal, and here is his 8th feature THE HOLDOVERS.
Payne boasts the film’s retro flair right out of the box, retrofitting the studio logos to the temporal designation of its story, and with his DP Eigil Bryld, they create an alchemical makeover through digital cinematography and cutting-edge post-production rendering. The resultant grainy texture, vintage palette and immense snowscape are so film-like, it does sound a death knell of celluloid, whether we like it or not.
THE HOLDOVERS takes place during the 1970 Christmas season, mostly in the fictional boarding school Barton Academy in New England. Paul Hunham (Giamatti) is an unpopular, highly principled, middle-aged professor, who is saddled with the obligation to chaperone the “holdovers” – students who are left on campus for the holidays.
Soon, Paul is stuck with only one charge, Angus Tully (Sessa), whose mother is on honeymoon with her new beau and cannot be contacted when the rest of the “holdovers” are felicitously taken away by one of the rich parent for a family ski trip. The pair is joined by Mary Lamb (Randolph), the school’s cafeteria administrator, who is grieving for her young son, a Barton alumnus recently perished when serving in Vietnam. Thus, a temporary family is set, with Mary functioning as a mediatory buffer between the two rivaling male egos.
If there is no love lost between Paul and Angus in the beginning, David Hemingson’s slightly astringent, drolly belligerent, predictably benevolent and familiarly structured (the bittersweet consequence is pretty much in the offing) script ascertains that after a profound interpersonal bonding, both will become a better person, and that’s the Christmas spirit that could and does melt our hearts. Along its character-driven, secrets-divulged narrative, THE HOLDOVERS ticks all the boxes concerning what makes human contact the raison d’être of our existence. On the one hand, Paul’s hardened loneliness and uncompromising pedantry betrays the shaft he has received before whereas Angus’s apparent recalcitrance and wry mordancy are the phenotypes of his own deep-set insecurity and dread caused by his original family; on the other hand, Mary’s character arc is relatively simplified, still doesn’t go much beyond the “magical negro” stereotype brimmed with pithy one-liners, maternal sensibility and steely dignity, yet, her own personal grieving process is confined with stock signifiers (drowning her sorrows, putting on a strong face and pining over children clothes), though Randolph is a phenomenal player, par excellence.
As the two leads, Giamatti re-emerges in a Payne’s film (after SIDEWAYS, 2004) with his fullest crustiness and the unsettling wall-eyed special treatment, effectuating a whiz-bang performance that is awash with characteristics and compassion; newcomer Sessa, in his maiden project, is a revelation, whose vulnerability and childish glee are infectious and the film enters the fast lane whenever he and Giamatti assume a verbal dust-up.
All in all, THE HOLDOVERS is a paramount feel-good promulgator of empathy and understanding, everyone has their own problems (whether it is trimethylaminuria or possible hereditary mental disease), life is full of unexpected happenstances (whether it is a disconsolate bereavement or a seemingly promising romance going the way of the buffalo) and horrible individuals (whether it is a bratty school bully, or in the adult world, a “penis cancer in human form”), be kind and be ready to strike out is that definitive line in the sand. In that sense, Payne’s latest offering is such an almost irresistible purity.
referential entries: Payne’s DOWNSIZING (2017, 6.8/10), NEBRASKA (2013, 8.3/10), THE DESCENDANTS (2011, 8.1/10), SIDEWAYS (2004, 8.3/10).
Cinema Omnivore 