Alexander Payne’s films often depict deeply flawed people in an empathetic way, almost challenging the viewer to root for them in spite of their awfulness – Miles Raymond in Sideways and Jim McAllister in Election come to mind. The Holdovers, Payne’s latest film and a return to form after Downsizing flopped, has a pair of these awful characters at the heart of its story, giving the viewer a window into each of them as they learn to develop empathy for the other – and for other people in general – that they’d previously lacked. (It’s streaming free on Peacock, or you can buy it on Amazon, iTunes, etc.)
Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is a brusque, old-school instructor of Ancient Civilizations at the Barton School, a tony boarding school in Massachusetts, loathed by students for his ungenerous grading and general classroom manner. The headmaster, angry with Paul over another matter, assigns him to be the one teacher who stays over the Christmas break with the “holdovers,” five students who can’t go home for the holidays for varying reasons. One of them, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), was supposed to join his mother and stepfather in St. Kitts, but gets a last-minute call that she’s going to St. Kitts alone with her husband on a delayed honeymoon, so Angus must stay on campus, and he’s not happy about it. It gets worse, as the other four boys get to head off on a ski trip, but Angus’s parents are unreachable (or just ignore the calls), so he can’t get permission to leave, stranding him with Paul, the head cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and the janitor Danny (Naheem Garcia). Mary recently lost her son, a Barton alumnus, in Vietnam, as he couldn’t get a student deferment, with a stark contrast between his fate as a rare Black student at Barton and his many white classmates.
Paul and Mary don’t know each other very well despite both working at the school for what appears to have been about twenty years, and neither knows Angus at all beyond his time in Paul’s class. Once he’s the only student left, Angus starts to act up, with comical and serious consequences, which helps the two get to know each other beyond the classroom. There’s a holiday party thrown by another Barton staffer, a Christmas dinner with just the three of them, an unplanned field trip, a definitely unplanned trip to the hospital, and more seemingly minor events that allow David Hemingson’s script to reveal more layers to each of the characters.
The film takes place over the winter break of 1970-71, a time when men were men, by which I mean they weren’t supposed to talk about or acknowledge feelings. Paul and Angus are cut from that cloth, and just getting to the points where they do reveal an emotion or two, such as Angus’s comments at the Christmas dinner, is a huge challenge for both men; for Angus, as a teenager, it could be seen as a sign of weakness by his peers, while for Paul, the gruff exterior hides some inner disappointment that the film only hints at later on. Mary is more open with her feelings, although they come out a lot more at the holiday party when she’s had a few, and early in the film it’s clear that neither Angus nor Paul is comfortable with even her modest degree of openness. The parting shot of the two men is brilliantly awkward, and dead on for their two characters, especially in that time period.
Randolph seems to be the favorite right now for Best Supporting Actress, and while I’ve only seen one other potential nominee (America Ferrera, for Barbie), it is a tremendous performance in a somewhat limited role. Giamatti was somewhat infamously snubbed for Sideways, earning his one Oscar nomination a year later for Cinderella Man, and while I could see him landing another nod this year, I’m also a little curious if he can play a character who isn’t fundamentally an asshole. I could see The Holdovers getting both of those nominations as well as Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay (GoldDerby shows it as the favorite for the latter), but I’m not sure how much credit here should go to Payne as the director versus the other contributors. The script itself is smart and witty and a great example of showing people developing empathy in a way that also gets the audience to empathize with them. All three lead actors are excellent. I wouldn’t take anything away from Payne here, but it felt to me like the best thing he could do was stay out of the way.
It’s that empathy bit that makes The Holdovers a superlative film rather than just a great one. Getting viewers to side with characters who are unlikeable in tangible ways is a real challenge for writer and actor – not just rooting for them like some anti-hero, but to embrace them as three-dimensional characters who have serious flaws and may not even like themselves. All three actors meet this challenge, and the script puts them in the right situations for them to show the audience who and what they are. Trying to do more would have ruined the magic.