Let’s start with the title: The Holdovers. This is what the protagonists of Alexander Payne‘s new feature are: scraps, pieces of humanity left behind, sadly alone.
Perhaps this is the best point of view to talk about a film that is a leftover from that distant time when cinema was made of writing, directing and respect for cinematic canons and solid interpretations. Even the gestures, the words, and the concepts seem to be what remains of ancient eras, like the classical studies that Professor Hunham teaches, an abstruse subject in the 1970s United States marked by Vietnam, the murders of the previous decade, the Nixon presidency, student protest.
At Barton Academy these things do not happen.
It is a high school for scions of the WASP aristocracy. Exclusive school, with strict rules and established traditions, including that of offering a tutor, the reclusive Hunham to be exact, to those boys who, for one reason or another, cannot re-embrace their families during the vacations. This happens to the young, bright and very rebellious Angus Tully, whose mother would rather spend Christmas with her new husband and relative family than with her son.
Rounding out this strange nativity is Mary Lamb, who, at best, puts God’s lamb in the oven with potatoes. The Principal up there has decided to take away the light from her eyes, her boyhood hopeful. He graduated from Barton thanks to the generosity of the conscience-cleansing rich, with a great future ahead, dropped into Southeast Asia. Where it was easier to send the African-American proletariat than to the hustlers and recommended sons of the rich.
Together, they will spend a very special Christmas, which will naturally change, to varying degrees, the course of their lives.
The Holdovers in the contemporary landscape is an anomaly.
A product with all the things put in the right place without overdoing it. Precisely for this reason, in an age of gigantism and narrative hypertrophic, the latter dictated by the loss of that precious commodity that is the gift of synthesis and the difficulty of following a single idea and narrative line, the hypothesis of telling a story with a linear path, with the division into acts paced, can be considered a gesture of rupture. Or of coming of age.
Instead, the good Alexander Payne rightly makes it a matter of style and a bit of principle. The Holdovers wants to be, and is, a classic film, like the order of the day in the golden age of American cinema. It has no particular peaks that make it, today or ever, a cult object, but a combination of excellent elements that make it a product to be watched with pleasure and remembered in the same way.
In the screenplay by David Hemingson, a man who did nearly 30 years of television writing before making his film debut with this story, there are all the right ingredients. The professor is stern and rigid, not a Dead Poet Society’s Keating, but just the bastard that almost everyone had in high school. He turns out to be a man with a complicated past and serious perspiration problems. The boy has behaviour problems for legitimate reasons, which will be discovered when the time is right and not trivial. The adoptive mother of these two problematic males, who both tend to be useless to society, carries the suffering of the world with her.
Payne goes along with it all by using the proper focal lengths, correct image composition, depth and fields as appropriate, with the right pace of narration and virtually perfect acting timing.
Paul Giamatti gives one of his best performances.
In Sideways, he was even superior, but it was too early to be considered the great actor he is. The rookie boy, Dominic Sessa, is a talent but one to be reviewed because it’s easy when you have a director and sidekick of this level. Da’Vine Joy Randolph is a magnificent actress and will win the Oscar. Unfortunately, with the shadows of the Academy’s political reasons and the current debate. Yet, she deserves it just for her outstanding performance.
The Holdovers is an excellent, enjoyable film that one will also want to see again cyclically. Above all, it does not pretend to be more than what it is. And that is precisely the thing to remember because that is how to extend the life of films. That is why the classics have remained classics. Billy Wilder knew this well.