Alexander Payne’s snowbound school comedy is warm, funny and better acted than it is written. Giamatti and Randolph carry it; David Hemingson’s script says its lesson out loud once or twice too often, and at 133 minutes it dawdles. We recommend it anyway.
Alexander Payne has made this sort of film before: a sour man, a stretch of time he does not want to spend, a small decency arriving late. The Holdovers puts the sour man in a school, gives him Paul Giamatti’s face, and sets the whole thing in the winter of 1970, shot and cut and scored as if it had been sitting in a vault since then. It is a good film, warmer than it first lets on, and it is carried by its actors more than its script. We recommend it, with the caveat that it is a quarter of an hour longer than it needs to be and tells you what it means more than once.
Giamatti plays Paul Hunham as a man who has decided that being right will do instead of being liked. He fails boys for sport, quotes the ancients at them, smells faintly of the drink he keeps in his desk, and cannot look anyone straight in the eye because one of his eyes will not cooperate. It would be an easy part to make hateful. Giamatti does not, and the trick is that Hunham enjoys himself. His first address to the boys in the dormitory, a list of rules delivered as if to a jury, made us laugh out loud, and we went on laughing at him for an hour before we noticed we had started to mind what happened to him.
The boys start as a group and thin out for reasons we will leave to the film. Brady Hepner’s Teddy Kountze is the bully, Ian Dolley, Jim Kaplan and Michael Provost fill out the dormitory, and then it is Angus. Dominic Sessa has a long, wary face that can go from insolent to stricken without a cut, and he uses it sparingly. Angus is rich and clever and has worked out that neither is going to save him from his family. Sessa never asks us to like him. He lets Hunham do that, slowly, and the film is at its best when the two of them are trading insults across an empty refectory and both are enjoying it more than they will admit.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph moved us more than anyone else on screen, and she does it by refusing to perform grief. Mary sits in the kitchen with the television and a drink, snaps at Hunham about his manners, and lets the loss show only at the edges: a pause before she answers, a look at the door when someone comes in who is not her son. Then, in a scene we will not describe, it stops staying at the edges. Randolph plays it with her back half-turned to the camera and it is the moment we will keep.
The period is done properly. Eigil Bryld shoots in soft brown light with visible grain, the snow outside grey rather than white, the corridors lit by whatever comes through the windows. Ryan Warren Smith’s production design and Wendy Chuck’s costumes keep to corduroy, wool and mustard, and nothing looks new. Mark Orton’s score is guitar and piano, quiet enough to forget. Kevin Tent cuts slowly and fades scenes out rather than snapping them shut, which suits the era and does not help the running time.
Hemingson’s script is the weak part. Its shape is a diagram: the man who never left teaches the boy, the boy teaches the man, and Mary is there to remind them both what real trouble looks like. Randolph makes her a person; the writing does not always. And when the film has made a point with a look, it tends to make it again with a speech. The reviews so far have been warm, and we mostly agree with them. We just wish Payne had trusted his cast to say less.
It is his best film since Sideways (2004), which also had Giamatti in it, and it shares that film’s fondness for a man who has wasted himself. Payne has never been sentimental about such men. He is kind to them, which is different, and this time the kindness is spread three ways.
It is a 15. Watch it in the week before Christmas, when the house is quiet and nobody is coming.
