'The Holdovers' review: Alexander Payne's bittersweet, irresistible holiday gift
(l-r.) Dominic Sessa stars as Angus Tully, Paul Giamatti as Paul Hunham and Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb in director Alexander Payne’s "The Holdovers." Credit: Focus Features/Seacia Pavao
PLOT A grouchy prep school teacher must babysit an unruly student over Christmas break.
CAST Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph
RATED R (language and adult talk)
LENGTH 2:13
WHERE Area theaters
BOTTOM LINE An irresistible cup of bittersweet holiday cheer.
Meet Paul Hunham, teacher of ancient history at the fictional Barton Academy. A once-promising Harvard man, he’s now stuck lecturing the pot-smoking sons of the staggeringly rich. Rumpled, walleyed, plagued by a medical condition that sours his body odor, Mr. Hunham has two pleasures in life: whiskey, and making his students miserable.
Who else would you pick for this role but Paul Giamatti — and who better to direct him than Alexander Payne? The two made magic together in “Sideways,” a 2004 sleeper hit about a self-sabotaging novelist on an ill-fated wine-tasting vacation. “The Holdovers” is only their second collaboration, and judging by this bittersweet beauty of a film their misfit chemistry hasn’t faded a bit.
The backdrop is Christmas, 1970 (the evocatively washed-out photography is by Eigil Bryld), and Hunham has been roped into babysitting several students who have nowhere else to go. When most of the boys luck into a skiing trip — someone's dad has a helicopter — Hunham is left with the angriest and snottiest of the lot, Angus Tully (a flinty Dominic Sessa, in his first feature film). A petty tyrant and a teen rebel — what could possibly go wrong?
When Tully convinces Hunham to venture into nearby Boston, the two discover some common ground. Hunham is still stinging from long-ago injustices; Tully can’t close the wound of his parents’ divorce. Yet even the most miserable humans will seek joy, and so the two find themselves at bars and parties, flirting with women and getting in trouble (Tully rubs a couple of hard-drinking locals the wrong way; Hunham explodes at a waitress in a fancy steakhouse). Even the school cook, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), comes along — though this working-class Black woman, whose son died in Vietnam, is a reminder that the mostly white boys of Barton will always float upward.
Perfect endings in movies are hard to come by, but “The Holdovers” has one. (The lovely screenplay is by David Hemingson, inspired by his own boarding-school days.) Without revealing the details, Hunham learns that being a teacher means more than drilling facts into heads, while Tully realizes he’s not the adult he pretends to be, but a kid — and that’s a wonderful thing. You can thank Mr. Payne and company for that lump your throat. It’s one of the best holiday gifts you’ll get this year.
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