The Holdovers

Dominic Sessa and Paul Giamatti

Alexander Payne has always been a dull visual stylist and his films have become increasingly pat and predictable; particularly his latest, The Holdovers. The Holdovers is a vehicle for Paul Giamatti who achieved his greatest critical acclaim in Payne's Sideways in which he successfully captured the feel of middle aged malaise. Giamatti plays another loser here, a bitter Classics teacher named Paul Hunham who works at a New England boarding school in 1970 seething in isolation as his life slides into oblivion. After pissing off his headmaster, Hunham is tasked with babysitting students who are stranded at the school during the Christmas holiday. Also stuck on campus is Mary Lamb (Da'vine Joy Randolph), the black cafeteria manager who has recently lost her son in Vietnam. 

The third wheel is Angus (Dominic Sessa), a troubled student from an unhealthy family background who, quite naturally, resents spending his holiday restricted to campus. The trio bond, spill secrets, and achieve personal growth with the help of their companions. The predictability of such a plot can be satisfying to an audience in a commercial picture like this. but I found it wearisome. Romantic possibilities conveniently pop up for each of the trio. The parallels that David Hemingson's script draws are too obvious: in one example the adults share shots of whiskey while the kids share joints. Giamatti and Randolph are fine, but Dominic Sessa is too self-assured for his role. All the juveniles in the film are too inert, lacking the rabbity energy of adolescence. 

The derivative nature of the plot also irked me. We know that hard-ass Mr. Hunham will lighten up and give his charge a fling, partly because the screenplay has filched the plot directly from Hal Ashby's The Last Detail. Instead of patriotic tunes as ironic counterpoint to the narrative, as in Ashby's film, we get Christmas carols. An incident where a ritzy restaurant refuses to serve Angus Cherries jubilee is a direct crib from the famous chicken salad on toast scene from Bob Rafelson's Five Easy Pieces, not a particularly obscure reference. The list of plot improbabilities is so long I don't wish to even address them, but if you haven't seen a film made before 1977, The Holdovers might be serviceable entertainment.