A prep school lecturer bonds with a troubled student and the school cook when the three remain on campus
over the Christmas holidays.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alexander Payne
Starring: Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da'Vine Joy Randolph, Carrie Preston, Brady Hepner, Gillian Vigman
While it's essentially a reworking of a French movie from the 1930s
(Marcel Pagnol's Merlusse), Alexander Payne's The Holdovers is very much a
love letter to American cinema of the 1970s. It's a character based drama
of the sort favoured by those filmmakers on the second tier of New
American Cinema - Hal Ashby, Bob Rafelson, John Cassavettes - but it also
has the textured melancholy of the works of those sadly now forgotten
American filmmakers who worked on a lower tier of the era - Dick Richards,
Buzz Kulik, John Hancock et al. Some of its affectations are a bit much
(the film opens with a blue band and the early '70s Universal logo, and
later shoehorns in a Cat Stevens song), but it nails the '70s
preoccupations with curbed freedoms, the horrors of Vietnam and the
uncertainty of living in the first time in modern history when America viewed its
president with contempt.
Writer David Hemingson takes elements from an unsold TV pilot
Payne had previously stumbled across and mixes them with the basic premise
of Merlusse, that of a cantankerous teacher being charged with looking after the
students left behind at his boarding school over the Christmas holidays.
The setting here is a boys' boarding school in 1970 New England (the
timeless nature of which aids the period verisimilitude). Classics
professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is as unloved by his pupils
as by his fellow faculty members, who view him as more Mister Potato Head
than Mister Chips. As he rarely leaves the campus due to social anxiety
and depression, he's lumbered with keeping an eye on 17-year-old Angus (Dominic Sessa), a rebellious smartass who has been kicked out of several previous
schools. Despite the threat of being sent to military school, which could
lead to deployment in Vietnam, Angus can't help but continue to lash out,
his anger fuelled by his mother's shunning him in favour of his new
stepfather. Acting as referee between this bickering pair is the school
cook, Mary (Da'Vine Randolph), who is grieving the death of her own
son in Vietnam.
Payne and Hemingson embrace clichés as old as Dickens, with Paul in the
Scrooge role, but the film's sentiment is very much in keeping with its
fealty to '70s cinema. Its sentimentality is of a quietly melancholic
nature that never peels any cheap onions in the hopes of provoking tears.
All three of its protagonists are quietly resigned to being let down by
life, which gives the film's simple moments of joy - like the one that
involves an improvised cherry liquor cake - an extra resonance.
In keeping with its '70s stylings, the harshness of reality hits equally
hard in points, like the crushing moment when Paul discovers the female
teacher he fooled himself into thinking might harbour romantic feelings
towards him is revealed to have a stereotypically hunky boyfriend. The
immediate heartache followed quickly by resignation on Giamatti's face
echoes that of Alan Arkin's similar revelation regarding Sally Kellerman
in Dick Richards'forgotten gem
Rafferty and the Gold Dust Twins. Just like Arkin in that film, Paul quickly picks himself up from
romantic disappointment and devotes himself to strengthening platonic
bonds, loosening up and opening his heart to Angus and Mary with a
revelatory trip to Boston.
It's a role Giamatti was born to play, a cob of anxiety wrapped in a duffel husk. We're never quite asked to pity Paul though, certainly not as
much as he pities himself, as we're reminded of his relative privilege.
His woes are contemplative rather than immediate like the grief of Mary.
Yet we understand his torment, that of an intellectual man denied
emotional pleasures. If Giamatti's Paul is the film's overthinking brain,
Randolph's Mary is its heart, tempering Paul's torment with a homely
wisdom that Randolph astutely ensures never quite crosses the line into
"Magic Negro" territory. Mary doesn't tell Paul anything he doesn't
already know. She just expresses it in a softer voice. Paul tries to
impart learned advice of "it gets better" to Angus, but like any teen, it
seems like a fabricated lie adults insisting on propagating. In his debut,
Sessa is never overwhelmed by the other parts of this triumvirate.
Like the films of Korea's Hong Sang-soo,
The Holdovers often has the atmosphere of a classic Peanuts
special. It's largely made up of vignettes. The ground is covered in snow.
A football plays a part in a brief comic moment. A piano is tinkled. All
three of its characters are Charlie Brown, but they act as each other's
Snoopy, raising spirits with a metaphorical lick of the face. Those
seeking a classic American character drama need not worry about Payne
pulling the football away at the last moment.
The Holdovers is on UK/ROI
VOD from February 19th.
