The Holdovers (2023)

The latest from director Alexander Payne is aimed squarely at boomers like me, with its coming of age tale and Payne’s familiar warm sitcom light touch. Most notably it is set in December of 1970, deliberately but artfully raising the nostalgia level to 11 for viewers of a certain age. It feels like we’ve seen this story a million ways in a million movies, but for whatever reason the one I kept thinking of was The Last Detail, director Hal Ashby’s deft 1973 dramedy of a young Navy man headed for the brig for a long stretch, escorted by an irascible Jack Nicholson who shows him one last good time. The Holdovers is much more genteel, and otherwise different in many ways, taking place in a boarding school over a Christmas break. Some students have nowhere to go and must stay at the school for the holiday, with faculty sharing the oversight duties year to year. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is the unfortunate candidate this year. Among other things, Hunham is an insufferable blowhard on the subject of Greeks, Romans, and other stuffy figures of classical humanities. He’s there with a gang of five boys, which briefly made me smell some version of The Breakfast Club coming. But soon, four of the kids are granted reprieve and taken away by the parents of one of them. The parents of the fifth, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), cannot be reached, which dooms Hunham and Tully to make do with one another. Hunham had briefly been hoping to binge on mystery novels. The school’s African-American cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), is also staying over. Her son graduated from the school the year before and was then drafted and died in Vietnam. The Holdovers has a great sense for how the last two weeks of December can go, especially among the holiday-orphaned—making do until Christmas, finding odd moments of poignant beauty randomly in the get-togethers (there’s a Frank Sinatra Christmas song here that hits me), and finally the release of Christmas week until the new year. These three holdovers make it to awkward Christmas affairs, doing their best. Tully and Hunham bicker a lot. The generational tension between them is thick, and Tully is on the verge of going wild. He’s on his third boarding school and he’s failing again—next stop, military school. David Hemingson’s script is well-fit to the unlikely trio, notably Giamatti, who preens and bellows as only he can, obviously at war with internal insecurities. The Holdovers is a thing of beauty and a wonderful holiday movie—bound to be a classic!