"The Holdovers": review

Paul Giamatti as walleyed, stinky classics professor Paul Hunham

"The Holdovers" is a 2023 dramedy directed by Alexander Payne about three people trapped at a boarding school, Barton Academy, over Christmas break: classics professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), smart-and-smartass student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa in his film debut), and campus chief cook Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph). Hunham, a hated figure on campus because of his strict ways, his awful body odor, and his propensity for failing the overprivileged sons of rich donors to the school, is stuck babysitting "the holdovers," i.e., the students who have nowhere to go over Christmas break for various reasons. Writer David Hemingson got an Oscar nomination for his original screenplay, and Giamatti and Randolph both received acting nominations as well. Sessa received a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Not bad for someone just starting out.

Based on the above formula, the general arc of the plot is predictable, so the pleasure is in the specifics as the plot unfolds. Of course the difficult teacher will turn out to have a human side; of course the difficult student will turn out to be deeper than his rebellious surface might indicate; and of course the chief cook will have a complicated background. But watching these misfits interact in a New England prep-school environment as the calendar flips from 1970 to 1971 is part of the fun and all of the story. The road to mutual understanding isn't easy.

Paul Hunham isn't supposed to be the one babysitting the holdovers: his colleague Endicott had the job but begged off, manufacturing an emergency involving his mother. Hunham is also on the headmaster's shit list for having failed the son of a donor, so the babysitting job has more than a whiff of punishment about it. At first, there are five holdovers: dumbass douchebag Teddy Kountze (Brady Hepner), Mormon Alex Ollerman (Ian Dolley), shrimpy Korean student Ye-joon Park (Jim Kaplan), cool quarterback Jason Smith (Michael Provost), and Angus Tully, who is a late addition to the holdovers when he suddenly gets a call from his recently remarried mother saying she's going on holiday with her new husband, but without Angus. Jason is pretty chill, and Alex and Ye-joon are timid newbies, but Angus and Teddy—smart and stupid—hate each other. Things remain tense for a few days until Jason's dad literally swoops in with a helicopter to take all the boys skiing... but Angus can't go because his parents, off on holiday, are unreachable for permission, so he has to stay behind. Hunham has trouble sympathizing with Alex at first, but Mary the cook gently scolds Paul about his hard-ass ways, reminding him that Angus is just a kid, and the last thing he needs is harshness when he's feeling abandoned. As Hunham's rigidity melts away, he allows Angus certain liberties, from riding out to Boston to see his biological dad, who resides in a mental institution, to setting off a New Year's firecracker in the campus kitchen. Hunham also confesses to Angus that his body odor comes from a condition he has: trimethylaminuria, which makes him smell unpleasantly like fish. From the beginning, though, Hunham has a soft spot for Mary, who recently lost her son in the Vietnam War, and he doesn't tolerate it when insensitive holdovers like Terry haughtily insult Mary early on.

Break lasts for about twelve days, with various incidents and hijinks to punctuate the tedium, including a dislocated shoulder, but in the end, Hunham gets in trouble when it turns out that Angus was never supposed to visit his biological father, who's been institutionalized for a particularly violent form of paranoid schizophrenia. During Angus's visit with his dad Thomas (Stephen Thorne), Angus tries to gift his father a snow globe, but we learn later that Thomas attempted to use the globe as a weapon. Even though Angus had convinced Hunham to let him see his father, Hunham, when called into the headmaster's office to face Angus's mother and step-father, takes all the blame upon himself. Consequences ensue.

"The Holdovers" has been hailed as a "Christmas movie," probably because it takes place at Christmas and seems to espouse certain Christmas-y values. Director Payne is on record expressing confusion and distaste about this, but a film is as it's perceived, or so the death of the author crowd would say: a work, once created, passes out of the ambit of the creator and is now part of the public domain. That said, I would agree that this is not a bad Christmas movie, just as "Die Hard" is not a bad Christmas movie. The plot rambles along at its own slow, steady pace, and while the comedy is rarely laugh-out-loud funny, the humor brings a lightness of spirit that counterbalances the story's much more serious moments, such as when Mary, whom we could have mistaken for a stereotypical font of wisdom, has a loud, drunken breakdown about her dead son while she's at a Christmas party.

Alexander Payne also directed "Sideways," which also stars Paul Giamatti as the nerdy half of a nerd-stud pair of friends (the stud is played by Thomas Haden Church). Payne seems to like quirky character studies, and in "Sideways," Giamatti displayed a charming diffidence that also comes out in this film. One thing that has been kept a trade secret, though, is the nature of the special effect used to create Paul Hunham's wandering eye. In real life, Paul Giamatti has no eye problems. At a guess, it's either CGI or a cleverly crafted contact lens.

Both Giamatti and Randolph absolutely deserve their Oscar nominations, and Dominic Sessa should have been nominated for an Oscar as well. I hope Sessa wins that BAFTA award. All three actors did a fine job of plumbing their characters' depths, and they were helped along by a script that felt real and human. And while the story as a whole had a predictable feel to it, we as viewers never knew, from moment to moment, what would happen next. Writer Hemingson has said that many moments in the film are autobiographical: there's a scene involving a prostitute soliciting sex that Hemingson says really happened to his dad while the two were on a father-son outing, and there's a cherries-jubilee scene involving way too much alcohol that was, according to Hemingson, based on something that happened to his mother. And what's wrong with mining your own life for moments of vérité, right?

Paul Giamatti attended Choate Rosemary Hall, a famous boarding school in New England, and he used those memories to inform his performance. I've actually been to Choate: it's got an impressive campus and looks like a college. As a student at Georgetown, I'd occasionally see fellow students wearing Choate sweatshirts; I didn't know how to pronounce the name: thinking of inchoate ("in-KO-eyt"), I thought the word might be pronounced "KO-eyt," but it's actually just "choat," rhyming with "coat." Actor Dominic Sessa is also a 2022 prep-school grad (Deerfield Academy), so he, too, plumbed his recent experience to play the part of Angus.

In the end, "The Holdovers" is a movie about three people who feel as if they're being punished, but who make their situation work out for themselves. It's almost like a happy version of Jean-Paul Sartre's Huis Clos (called variously No Exit or Behind Closed Doors in English), a play about three people trapped in hell and eternally torturing each other (hence the famous quote "Hell is other people"—L'enfer, c'est les autres). Unlike Sartre's hell, though, the hell of "The Holdovers" has a bittersweet conclusion, and the occupants of this hell redecorate the place from the inside. It's a story of hurt turning into healing, of heaven being other people and yes, it's a good Christmas movie. Right up there with "Die Hard."