Digital Film Review - The Holdovers (2023)

*** Second Opinion for digital release – first review published on January 17th, 2024***

Christmas is a time for togetherness and celebration with your closest relatives. The prospect of having to spend it with people you don’t like, let alone know or understand well, would undoubtedly be uncomfortable for the majority. It is in this initial discomfort that Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers finds sincerity, tenderness, and a bottomless pit of snark and laughter.

Our story takes place at an elite private boys’ school, Barton Academy, during the Christmas period of 1970. It’s a school rife with students who display the popular combination of wealth and stupidity, with the majority of the boys going on to Ivy League schools as a result of the former despite their abundance of the latter. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is the school’s classics teacher – a stubborn curmudgeon who is hated by students and staff alike due to his harsh grading, patronising personality, and unfortunate hygiene. The hygiene is due to medical issues, while the grading and personality are entirely voluntary.

During the holiday break, Hunham is stuck doing holdover duty, where he must look after those who aren’t able to return to their families for Christmas. Tensions reach a boiling point when changes in circumstance result in only three people holding over – Hunham, the intelligent but unruly student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), and Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s head chef, who is reeling from the recent death of her son. Like it or not, these three are stuck together this holiday season, and the growth that they all undertake is a shared journey of beauty, poignancy, and hilarity all at once.

Not only does the film accurately capture its 1970 setting through its corduroy costuming, muted art direction, and hovering concerns for the ongoing Vietnam War, but Eigil Bryld’s cinematography boasts a graininess that looks as though it could have come from the kind of film stock used for cinema in the 1970s. Just as the characters’ woes concern the weighing of time – be it the painful past for Mary, the unsatisfactory present for Hunham, or the terrifying future for Angus – the imagery looks as though it is frozen in time, trapped alongside the characters.

The wide shots of empty halls and blanketed snow as far as the eye can see have an aesthetic beauty in their colour grading and presentation, but they enhance how lonely these people are both internally and physically. In a harsh, unforgivable world where, as Hunham laments, the rich don’t care, integrity is a punchline, and budding children are lost to war, it is easy to become jaded and hopeless.

But The Holdovers is not about that. Although it is dealing with some heavy subject matters, there is a gentleness to its storytelling that makes it wonderfully warm and accessible, despite the billowing cold of the setting. Another filmmaker or screenwriter might have doubled down on the darkness of the world around these characters, perhaps even succumb to it. Yet Payne, and screenwriter David Hemingson, find the joy that these characters may have even given up on at the film’s start. Melancholia is challenged at every turn through rivalry, wit, and, most importantly, empathy. Slowly but surely those empty spaces in the setting and cinematography become not of isolation, but of opportunity and potential. This is not another film about how life is hard and short. It is a film about how people can be positive influences and sources of inspiration to each other, thus making life worth living.

The earnest humanism of the script can bring tears to the eyes of those who embrace its sentiments. Yet tears of laughter are just as likely, for The Holdovers is the funniest film in many a moon. Its setup already has a comical edge, with characters who initially grind each other’s gears bickering and brawling to juxtaposing visuals and tunes, the most notable instance being a disgruntled Hunham chasing a reckless Angus to the sound of Deck the Halls. But the writing is consistently sharp and observational through the character parallels and conflicts, with each of the trio acting as a foil to the other.

The humour is never at the expense of the characters, but rather born from their unique personalities being forced into situations where they must interact. The results are side-splitting, and includes some of the most bitingly idiosyncratic dialogue of recent cinema. While the conversations on life and purpose can be bittersweet and life-affirming alike, some of the insults the characters level at each other should be hung in the Louvre. “A genuine troglodyte”, “snarling visigoths”, and “hormonal vulgarian” are just the tip of the venomous iceberg.

Weaving all of this together are a trio of impeccable performances that play off each other with such humour and delicacy that the chemistry is in a class of its own. Da’Vine Joy Randolph will likely win this year’s Best Supporting Actress Oscar, and deservedly so. Her sarcastic, no-nonsense attitude is as funny and charismatic as her subdued maternal grief is heartbreaking to watch come out. Dominic Sessa makes his film debut here, but proves himself a natural. He holds his own against veterans like Randolph and Giamatti while simultaneously capturing both the rashness and insecurity that makes Angus so identifiable.

However, if we’re splitting hairs, it is Giamatti who shines the brightest. His character’s arc from bitter old fart to selfless, hopeful source of inspiration is magnificently realised. Giamatti’s performance not only sells humour and pathos, but consistently displays the humanity that makes both the character and the film as a whole so richly nuanced and deceptively powerful.

Why UK distributors chose to have the cinema release of The Holdovers, which is comfortably a Christmas film, in the following January, boggles the mind. Yet its resonance and delightful craftsmanship can be appreciated and celebrated at any time of the year. While it’s perhaps a shade too long in terms of runtime, it more than makes up for this with its incredible performances, gorgeous filmmaking, timely themes, and utterly brilliant screenplay. Some may view its storyline and resolutions as conventional, and although that’s not an incorrect conclusion, it has been so long since a story of this calibre has been delivered with such honest empathy at its core. If there is justice in this world then it will join the ranks of It’s A Wonderful Life, Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, and (yes) Die Hard among the canon of Christmas classics. The Holdovers is not just a great Christmas film; it is a great film, full stop.