"The Holdovers"

    ☆☆☆☆½ 

Don't be fooled, The Holdovers is not here to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. It doesn't exist to take a misanthrope and make him a happy, well-adjusted member of society, nor to show how an irascible taskmaster of a teacher, hated by his students, becomes a source of joy and inspiration. The Holdovers is not that simple.

Though it comes from the director of The Descendants, which, year after year, rises even further in my estimation and has become, I think, one of the really important movies of my life, The Holdovers is not The Descendants in a boarding school. It is its own complicated thing that refuses, even as it fades to black, to be easily defined. Yes, it's funny—at times it's very funny—but it could hardly be defined as a comedy. Yes, it's emotionally fraught—at times, very much so—but it could hardly be defined as a heavy drama.

Even before The Holdovers begins, it signals its intentions as director Alexander Payne opens with an old blue-and-white notice from the Motion Picture Association of America that the following feature has been rated R. This sort of thing vanished from movies in the early 1980s, but was prevalent in the early 1970s, when The Holdovers takes place; even if you're not familiar with it, you sense it's something different. The opening shots of the film have some scratches and grain added, and those who remember movies before the days of digital projection will recognize what Payne is signaling here: This movie is a throwback to a different time, and a different sensibility. What of those who don't understand the in-joke? Maybe it doesn't make much difference, or maybe the important thing is that The Holdovers is rather explicitly made for those who will.

But those who don't care about such things will still find something wonderful in The Holdovers, a movie that sets up its story quickly—only to reveal that what we think it's about is not at all what it's going to be about. To begin, it seems The Holdovers will tell how one curmudgeonly old teacher of history (he prefers "ancient civilization") at a tony New England boarding school, will need to care for five young boys between Christmas and New Year's Eve 1970. Except midway through telling that story, four of the boys are whisked away, leaving just the teacher (Paul Giamatti), one student (impressive newcomer Dominic Sessa), and the cafeteria manager (Da'Vine Joy Randolph).

Each of them, we come to learn, is living with the sort of deep, anguished pain that will never go away. Mary, the cafeteria manager, is struggling to make it through each day without her husband and her son, both of whom died terrible, awful deaths. Angus, the student, has been abandoned by his mother and her new husband—and harbors another secret that is revealed as the story progresses. And Paul, the teacher, is afflicted both with physical ailments that render him unattractive and undesirable, and with a deeper, harder betrayal from which he'll probably never fully recover.

It sounds trite to say that over the course of the two weeks that the teacher, the cafeteria manager and the student have to live with each other, they'll discover other truths about themselves and each other, but that is indeed what happens in The Holdovers, though it doesn't begin to suggest the way the film juggles emotional depth with comedic observation—and at least one painfully funny physical moment—without ever feeling maudlin or contrived.

The Holdovers does not try for the easy laugh or the easy cry. No one develops a fatal illness or plunges to their death or uncovers some dark conspiracy. The film is about how these people relate to each other, how they come to know each other and share the one thing that really matters: time.

Whether The Holdovers can catch hold in a moviegoing environment that favors big, bold statements as opposed to small, carefully observed ones remains to be seen. In another era, The Holdovers would be a big hit with both critics and audiences, would be the kind of movie we still talk about 30, 40, 50 years later. In that, it does seem like, well, a holdover from some other time—and that's what makes it feel all the more special.

Viewed October 28, 2023 — AMC Burbank 16

1855