Alexander Payne (2023)
The Holdovers isn’t just set in 1970 but could have been made in that year. According to interviews that Alexander Payne has given about the film – his first since Downsizing (2017) – its retro qualities are intentional, an expression of nostalgia for Hollywood pictures that ignited Payne’s love of cinema in his early teens. This is a dodgy pretext for his comedy-drama’s creaky mechanics. Most of the action takes place at a New England boys’ boarding school – the fictional Barton Academy – over Christmas and New Year. A handful of boys, due to family circumstances, need to remain at Barton rather than return home during the school holidays. Supervising them is to be avoided at all costs: the teacher lined up to do the job this year invents a story to excuse himself; the task falls instead to Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti). The Holdovers, showing at the London Film Festival, is named both for the youngsters without homes to go to and for Paul, in the same boat as they are and a superannuated figure in more ways than one. He’s an obvious candidate for holdovers duty – a confirmed bachelor who has not only taught at Barton for decades but resides there all year round. He’s also a harsh taskmaster, loathed by his students; a teacher of ancient history, Greek and Latin whose laborious sarcasm is a dead language all of its own, amusing him and him only.
To begin with, there are five students staying behind: Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), Teddy Kountze (Brady Hepner) and Jason Smith (Michael Provost) are older boys; Ye-Joon Park (Jim Kaplan), whose home is in South Korea, and Alex Ollerman (Ian Dolley), whose parents are Mormon missionaries, are pre-adolescents. These last two are pleasant: judging from Teddy in particular, it seems Barton boys turn into entitled scumbags at puberty. Jason’s father decides at the eleventh hour to take him on a Christmas skiing holiday. Smith senior’s helicopter descends on the school to whisk his son away – along with all the other holdovers except Angus, whose mother and stepfather are on honeymoon and can’t be contacted to give their permission. It strains credibility that all the boys are invited on the holiday (and that Alex’s missionary parents are easier to get hold of instantly than Angus’s honeymooning ones) but Payne needs to clear the decks for the film’s central relationship. Paul Hunham’s popularity isn’t increased by his physical defects: he has strabismus and he smells bad. Once Angus is the lone boy stuck at Barton, his cabin fever rises – to the point of telling Paul to his face (though at a strategic distance from it) that he stinks. Paul explains he’s suffering from a genetic condition; he maybe draws a sliver of comfort from its polysyllabic Latin name – trimethylaminuria (aka fish odour syndrome). The protagonist’s freshness problem is apt enough in this musty movie.
This is only the second of Payne’s eight features to date without his name on the screenplay (the other was Nebraska (2013)). Even so, it was he who got the idea for The Holdovers – from watching a 1935 Marcel Pagnol picture, Merlusse – then asked David Hemingson (who had previously written exclusively for television) to work up a script. Merlusse tells of how ‘A tough teacher charged with looking after the students left behind at a boarding school during the Christmas holidays rises to the challenge and comes to better understand the boys in his care’ (Wikipedia). The Holdovers has plenty of Anglophone antecedents, too. Paul Hunham, as part of the school furniture, is a (cynical) sort of Mr Chips, though he’s closer kin – a stern classics master masking his inner pain – to Crocker-Harris in Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version. As a bah-humbug killjoy in the season to be jolly, Paul can obviously trace his line back to Scrooge. The posh school setting and the virtual two-hander that develops also bring to mind Scent of a Woman: although Martin Brest’s 1992 film (itself derived from a 1970s Italian movie) is set during Thanksgiving weekend, the lead schoolboy’s reason for spending it minding Al Pacino’s blind, irascible ex-soldier is to earn cash to pay his air fare home at Christmas.
The Holdovers moves at a leisurely pace. It’s not a struggle to sit through but you can’t believe, once it’s over, how the film took 133 minutes to tell its mostly predictable, sparsely populated tale. Paul’s and Angus’s companions at Barton over the holiday are Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), chief cook in the school kitchens, and Danny (Naheem Garcia), the caretaker. Lydia Crane (Carrie Preston) – a secretary who, on the last day of term presents Paul with some home-made festive cookies that he doesn’t want – returns home to Boston but invites the other four to her Christmas Eve party. The characterisation of Mary and Danny, nearly the only African Americans in the film, is a particularly unfortunate illustration of its dated feel: these are good, simple Black folk and those adjectives are inter-related. Because they’re Black, they can be simple, in the sense of one-dimensional; making them simply good seems the decent white liberal thing to do. (Danny is such a perfunctory role that, alone among the Barton staff and students, he doesn’t even rate a surname.) Mary would rather be cooped up at the school than try and fail to celebrate Christmas with her sister’s family. A single parent, she’s mourning her son and only child, Curtis, recently killed in action in the Vietnam War. This is another uncomfortable aspect of Payne’s retrospection. A key context of ‘New Hollywood’ films with contemporary settings, Vietnam in The Holdovers – Curtis Lamb’s tragic gallantry, Angus’s angry opposition to the threat of military service – functions almost as part of the nostalgic texture.
Everybody (who’s somebody) hurts in The Holdovers: Paul’s and Angus’s private griefs are more numerous than Mary’s but still pretty clichéd. The narrative is all about revealing these griefs in the fullness of time, so preparing the ground for Paul and Angus to ‘grow’ by getting to know more about each other. Although Barton is full of spoiled rich kids, it also takes poor, clever boys on scholarships, in order to help the film’s plot machinery. Paul himself, who was from the wrong side of the tracks, used to be one of them; Mary’s son was another. Paul went on to study at Harvard but didn’t graduate: his Barton headmaster, of whom Paul speaks with uncharacteristic respect and gratitude, offered him a teaching job nevertheless. That headmaster’s successor, Dr Hardy Woodrup (Andrew Garman), is a very different matter and in thrall to his students’ parents’ cheque books: Woodrup, once a pupil of Paul’s, fingers him for holdovers supervision partly to punish Hunham’s flunking a senator’s son in a recent exam. Paul’s curmudgeonly view of life turns out to be largely class-based. Harvard destroyed his faith in meritocracy: another student, better off than Paul though not in the brains department, plagiarised his work; Paul took a dramatic revenge and was sent down (or the Ivy League equivalent).
Angus Tully never quite represents, though, what Paul hates about the system. The boy’s a bright student, for a start; it emerges that he too has been expelled, from a succession of other schools, his unruly behaviour the legacy of a traumatic family life. After first claiming that his father’s dead, Angus persuades Paul to take him to Boston and visits his father (Stephen Thorne) in the mental institution where he’s being treated for early onset dementia and paranoid schizophrenia. Paul decides to justify this expedition (and Barton’s footing the bill for it) as ‘field work’: while they’re there, he and Angus spend time in a museum of classical history. To kill two birds with one stone, Payne also uses the trip to Boston as an outing for Mary, who has cheered up enough for a short stay with her sister (Juanita Pearl).
I’ve not been a fan of Alexander Payne’s films with the sole and definite exception of Sideways (2004), his previous collaboration with Paul Giamatti. The latter has worked regularly since Love and Mercy (2014) and Straight Outta Compton (2015) but those are the most recent films of his that I’ve watched: I wanted to see The Holdovers chiefly because of Giamatti. He’s as expert as you’d expect but is playing a character so secondhand and obvious that he has little room for manoeuvre or scope for originality. Although the script gives Paul Hunham plenty to say, it’s parsimonious with funny individual details for him. One of the few is the revelation that, on the rare occasions Paul gives a Christmas present, it’s always Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations: he has bulk-bought copies for the years or decades ahead. Giamatti makes the most of this and has a few other fine, startling moments: Paul’s incredulous laugh when asked if he’s ever been married; his rebuke, in a high-end Boston restaurant – ‘What kind of fascist hash factory are you running here?’ – to the waitress who refuses to serve dessert containing alcohol to underage Angus. (This episode somewhat evokes the diner sequence in one of the movies Payne may be keen to celebrate: Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces (1970).) Dominic Sessa is evidently talented, if prone to overact – due probably to a combination of understandable nerves and eagerness (this is his screen debut) and the thinly written character he’s playing. Da’Vine Joy Randolph brings plenty of astringent wit to her essentially undignified role.
A few paragraphs back, I called The Holdovers ‘mostly predictable’: to be more specific, it’s predictable until the last fifteen minutes. The action is scored throughout to a mixture of Christmas carols and tentatively hopeful, twinkly music (by Mark Orton). Paul and Angus progress from shouting matches to getting to like and respect one another. But Angus’s egregious mother (Gillian Vigman) and stepfather (Tate Donovan), once they learn about the visit to the boy’s ailing father, are soon in the craven headmaster’s office to complain about their son’s unauthorised excursion to Boston. They want Angus to quit school for the military but Paul Hunham takes the rap for Boston, which somehow means that Angus stays on at school (and away from Vietnam). Having, like a good Roman, fallen on his sword, Paul wastes no time leaving Barton Academy. He says his farewells to Angus and Mary though without exchanging contact details with either. He mentions stashing his books with a friend in Syracuse and heading off to Carthage but he’s really on the road to nowhere (the film’s closing shot, confirming that, also echoes Five Easy Pieces). After setting things up for a heartwarming finale, Alexander Payne opts for a bitter parting shot, almost literally expressed. Early on, Hardy Woodrup proudly shows off to Paul a bottle of Rémy Martin Louis XIII cognac, a gift from the Barton board of trustees; Paul swipes it from Woodrup’s office on his last visit there. As he drives away from the school, he takes a swig of the brandy then stops to spit it out, as if he can’t stand the taste. Paul’s misanthropy and resentment of privilege are finally, fully intact. Happy endings were pretty well an anathema in New Hollywood, circa 1970. Is the surprise sign-off here a different kind of nod by Alexander Payne to the films of his youth?
12 October 2023
