Every year around the holiday season, big-budget films are pushed out by large companies vying for awards and major profits.
We’ve got the latest Marvel movie “The Marvels,” Ridley Scott’s new historical epic “Napoleon” and the divisive “Saltburn” all in the last few months.
But I have been left feeling as if something was missing after seeing these.
I’ve grown tired of spectacle, tired of the regurgitated, formulaic movies we get every year that are sorely lacking in one major component — humanity.
Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers” carries more passion, love and humanity in its runtime than those three previous films could muster together. The story is rather simple — a few students, a grumpy teacher and the school’s cook must “holdover” at their private school academy over Christmas break in the late 1960s.
What slowly unfolds is a touching meditation on loneliness, regret and heartache that gets magnified during the Christmas season. When everyone around you is reuniting with family and other loved ones, it can be very difficult to be without love — or to be a holdover away from your family. Cracks in everybody’s hard exteriors start to show — just waiting to be filled with genuine human connection.
“The Holdovers” contains beautifully crafted characters that highlight the melancholy of the holidays perfectly.
The cast is led by the brilliant Paul Giamatti, who plays Paul Hunham — channeling every uptight teacher we’ve ever had — but also imbuing this character with so much hidden underneath we can’t help but love him. Frustrated by the arrogance of the wealthy schoolboys and the politics of the school, he takes his anger — and suppressed regret — out on the boys.
Newcomer Dominic Sessa delivers one of my favorite performances of the year as Angus, a 15-year-old holdover at the school who uses wit and attitude to cover up the insecurity and hurt he feels. It is through interacting with Hunham that both characters’ inner turmoil and humanity are revealed.
Finally, Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s character Mary — the school’s cook — is the most heartbreaking of them all.
“Randolph is understated and moving, finding the weight of grief. It just seems harder for her to move through the world,” Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com said.
These three characters have such a brilliant dynamic that, through their conversations, we can understand their troubles and see them healing. Screenwriter David Hemingson does such a terrific job writing real human characters — there are no over-dramatic monologues and no violent outbursts.
Much like real life, we only glimpse the pain underneath. One of my favorite scenes shows Giamatti’s Mr. Hunham finding Angus’s antidepressant medicine, only to go and take his own meds. In another scene, Randolph’s Mary remarks that Hunham can’t even “dream a whole dream” when he expresses his doubt about writing an entire book.
Such personal storytelling just isn’t the priority anymore in the cynical, “nothing matters anymore” world we live in.
Yes, stories similar to this have been told before. Yes, the film makes use of nostalgia tactics, channeling the 70s with its looks, sounds and style. Yes, there are cliches.
But as screenwriter Hemingson said in a conversation with Screen Rant, “It was meant to be a moment in time, both timely and timeless.”
What could be more timeless and meaningful than a couple of people truly connecting?
“The Holdovers” soars because it is sincere — and sincerity is something I will pay to see every time.
Rating: 5/5
