The Holdovers (2023)

Directed by Alexander Payne

There’s more than a hint of Scrooge in this tale of characters marooned over Christmas at an exclusive New England boarding school.

Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), classics teacher at the posh Barton Academy, is disliked equally by students and staff.  A mean-spirited martinet, he seems to like nothing better than doling out sarcasm and flunking students, impeding their chances of getting into good universities.

As Christmas 1970 approaches, he is the teacher designated to look after those pupils who, for one reason or another, can’t return to their families for the holidays.  The number of such boys swells from four to five when Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a bright but disruptive senior, is forced to join them after his mother tells him she needs to spend time alone with Angus’ new stepdad.

Angus’s dismay is compounded when the fates conspire to rescue the other four boys from their Yuletide fate, leaving Angus with Paul plus the school cook Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a warm-hearted woman grieving the loss of her only child in Vietnam, as the third member of the group. Things look bleak for everyone.

Alexander Payne, re-uniting with Giamatti nearly twenty years after Sideways (2004), has produced a sharp-witted and touching comedy-drama that plays like a loose adaptation of A Christmas Carol.  Giamatti inhabits the role completely, portraying a lonely man embittered by past and present deficiencies who has constructed a defensive wall that stops him seeking happiness for himself or allowing it to those around him.  

The way this wall is broken down over the course of the movie is funny, charming and strangely believable, as prods, taunts, opportunities and mishaps combine to force him out of his shell.  Without revealing too much about the ending, a character as knowledgeable as Paul would be with the concept of a Pyrrhic Victory would surely permit himself a wry smile as he contemplates its opposite: losing the battle but, just maybe, winning the war.

Angus and Mary each find some improvements in their situations, too, though the script is not so simplistic that it suggests their woes are over. But there may be light at the ends of their tunnels.

Payne does some gentle skewering of the privileged mediocrity of the all-male, mostly all-white, school but never allows the tone to become strident.  Great soundtrack, too.