Exquisite performances from Da'Vine Joy Randolph and Paul Giamatti, genuine New England locations, actual winter weather, and a great debut by Dominic Sessa, The Holdovers is a fine example of the prep school coming-of-age drama, with comedy bits.
Giamatti is Paul Hunham, a cranky history teacher at a Deerfield-style remote New England prep school, who is punished for his assholery by babysitting the school's holdovers for the two-week Christmas break.
Hunham's prickly personality and mild drunkenness make him impossible to like: Hunham is hated by the rich white boys he teaches, for his coarse attitude and rigid grading standards; and he has pissed off the headmaster (a former student of his) by flunking the son of a rich patron who's also a US Senator. While taking a drink at a candlepin bowling joint, he nearly picks a fight with the bartender and Santa Claus by "actually"-ing them over the history of Santa Claus. When he attempts to defuse a potential bar fight earlier in the movie, his arcane sentence structure confounds the drunken louts and nearly makes it worse. His only two cordial relationships with adults reveal something of his character: they're both with non-faculty school staff. He has a crush on the cheery secretary Miss Crane (Carrie Preston), the kind of crush a lonely man has on a woman who is nice to everyone. He's also friends with the head of the kitchen, Mary (Randolph) - I wonder if Mary is friends with other men on the faculty, or whether these two see each other as fellow outsiders?
Paul Giamatti is an excellent actor, and he has no trouble making his character grouchy. I wonder if it was totally necessary to make him have a walleye, AND a congenital body odor problem. I suspect they wanted to make the cause of Hunham's lifetime of solitude - or loneliness - more obvious, by making him unappealing to look at and smell?
Director Alexander Payne uses a light touch with the emotional development of the film. The pivotal Christmas Eve party is handled with sensitivity and the performances are allowed to do the important work.
The sensitive strummed guitar score and singer-songwriter needle drops did not help set the early 70s tone of the story, they only drew attention to how the director was obsessed with making an early-70s-style movie that needed guitars strummed sensitively. There's a Cat Stevens song, for crissake!
The only thing bigger than my hate for fake snow in movies is my love for real snow in movies, and the producers were blessed with an actual snowstorm during filming. Weather: The Ultimate Production Value! As a lifelong New Englander, I was pleased with their depiction of Massachusetts in 1970. They got the small-town looks right - how many neon signs are vintage, and how many were made for the movie? The Back Bay skyline was right (Prudential tower but no Hancock), the downtown Boston locations looked good, even where they had to use CGI to make Chinatown look right. We were tickled pink to see the interior of the Somerville Theater and the exterior of The Chateau in Waltham (aka "the fascist hash factory").
The plot conveniences were clunky in places. Sometimes deux ex machina had to pull hard on the rope to get the curtain to reveal everyone's character development. But no one's watching The Holdovers to see a movie with a perfectly assembled plot, are they? It's for the characters, and their journeys. The Holdovers ending is maybe a tiny bit too tidy without being too happy. I'm giving The Holdovers an A-minus for making me look at Hunham's walleye for two hours, and for the needle drops.
NOTE: I was sorry that the movie makes no comment on the most famous holdover of all time, a man who also made Christmas difficult for those under his power, Ebenezer Scrooge! This movie is set 30 years to early to cite the second most famous holdover, Harry Potter.
No Theater Notes: I wanted to see this in the theater in December 2023, and my local Triplex was showing it for a week, but I was on the second week of a nasty virus, the whole family was ailing, and I just didn't/couldn't do it. It's showing for free on Peacock, check it out.