The reunion of filmmaker Alexander Payne and comedian Paul Giamatti, almost 20 years after Sideways, does not disappoint. The Holdovers, the eighth feature film from the About Schmidt filmmaker, is a bittersweet film, intelligent, touching, and just caustic enough not to be mawkish.
Stuck for the holidays in a posh New England boys’ college, Paul Hunham (Giamatti), a history professor specializing in antiquity, is in charge of a handful of students who have no clue. somewhere to go. Their families are too distant, busy or detached to take them out of the residential school.
Paul is a demanding, psycho-rigid teacher who swears by the college’s code of conduct and looks down on mediocre students, the sons of donors who expect to graduate effortlessly on their way to an Ivy League university. Everything pits him against Angus (Dominic Sessa), a brilliant but arrogant and troublemaker student. Unsurprisingly, thanks to their respective gray areas – or because of them – a form of complicity will arise between them.
The plot of The Holdovers, a sort of cross between Dead Poets Society by Peter Weir and The Breakfast Club by John Hughes, is nothing very surprising or original. We know straight away which woodgrain-clad family car we are getting into. But under the magnifying glass of Alexander Payne, this learning story on the razor’s edge between drama and comedy finds all its singularity.
Paul Giamatti is very credible as a sullen misanthrope that almost no one likes, starting with his colleagues. There is only Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, excellent), a cook in mourning for her son who became a soldier in Vietnam, with whom he has exchanges worthy of the name. In the company of Angus, however, they will end up forming a semblance of a blended family for Christmas Eve.
The Holdovers, if it qualifies as a “Christmas movie”, is one of a completely different type than Elf or Love Actually. We find there the ironic tone of Alexander Payne, that of The Descendants or even Nebraska, to such an extent that we are surprised that he is not the author of the screenplay (signed David Hummingson and on which he collaborated) . It is a film that is both funny and touching, nostalgic and melancholy, filmed in the style of a 1970s film, with this particular grain that does not seem borrowed or false.
We have known Alexander Payne more bitingly in social satire (Citizen Ruth, Election). The Holdovers, an altogether conventional work, is however deeper than it seems at first glance. It is about mourning, privilege, abandonment, failure, transmission, the family that we choose rather than the one that is sometimes imposed on us. It is also, for Alexander Payne, a return to form after the disappointing Downsizing five years ago.
