I’m someone who has only a small degree of tolerance for Christmas music. Two weeks before Thanksgiving, I used up my entire 2023 quota (“The Little Drummer Boy”! Baby Jesus songs!) watching The Holdovers. Not that this newest Alexander Payne film is all sweetness and light; Payne’s cynicism about the way folks cope with the human condition undercuts the saccharine nature of his score. But I’m still trying to decide how I feel about this latest entry in the boys-at-a-boarding-school genre. (Think Rushmore, The Dead Poet’s Society, A Separate Peace . . .) The reviewer at the New York Times adored The Holdovers, using it as a jumping off point for his own very mixed personal memories. The reviewer at the Los Angeles Times hated it, accusing Payne of insincerity, and worse. Me? I found it appealing in its best moments and over-calculated in its worst. I liked these characters, but couldn’t bring myself to accept their reality.
Paul Giamatti, who shone in Payne’s 2004 Sideways, is something of a specialist in playing morose men who can’t quite accommodate to their own time and place. Somewhat like the late Wilford Brimley, he seems never to have been young. As a hapless wine connoisseur in Sideways, he came off as emphatically middle-aged when he was still in his thirties. Now he’s aged into the role of a longtime teacher of ancient history at a tony New England prep school where most of the boys (in their jackets and ties and floppy 1970s hair) have grown up expecting winter-break Caribbean vacations and easy coasting into Ivy League colleges. (Giamatti, the son of a former president of Yale who later became the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, has had his own prep school experience, so he knows the drill.) In The Holdovers he’s fitted out with a cutting wit, a secret sorrow, and a series of small physical afflictions that make him unpleasant company to just about everyone. There is about him from the start, though, a quiet sweetness that I wasn’t expecting, especially in his treatment of the campus’s few women.
One of them, Mary Lamb, is the head of the school’s cooking staff. Like Giamatti’s Paul Hunham, she’s stuck on campus during winter break. And she too has a sorrow, though it’s hardly a secret: her only child, a highly promising graduate of the school, has just been killed in Vietnam. As movingly played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Mary is both sweet and sour: happily, the script doesn’t allow her to be merely a sad-faced bereaved mom. The Vietnam angle does take us by surprise, because there’s little sense that this story is set back in time. But perhaps that’s accurate: on this campus, among these well-parented young men, an overseas war is hardly top of mind. Hell, no—they have no intention of going . . . and their parents will see that their draft boards stay far, far away.
The third member of the trio left behind at Christmas is a first-time movie actor who makes an impressive debut here. Dominic Sessa, an actual prep school grad (class of ’22) plays the classic smart but angry kid with no friends and no family to rely on. Naturally, he and Mr. Hunham develop a prickly but unmistakable bond, one that will take an unexpected turn late in the film. I’m a bit Scrooge-ish about the outcome, but Payne’s sympathy for the walking wounded remains very much intact. (There’s one more such character in the film that I deliberately haven’t mentioned, but suffice it to say that Payne is very well-named.)
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