Tripwire Reviews Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers

Payne’s World

Tripwire’s senior editor Andrew Colman reviews Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers in cinemas in the UK from 19 January…

The Holdovers
Director: Alexander Payne
Stars: Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Randolph

The Holdovers offers a comfy, over-familiar premise and setting in a remote New England boarding school in late 1970, but that aside this is still very much an Alexander Payne movie, replete with low-key reverses, unreliable narrators and deeply flawed male leads. In other words, this is Payne’s territory, a place of unspoken longing, failure and repression, and very much a worthwhile entry in the director’s canon.

From the moment the movie starts, you’re transported back to a radically different era – the early 70s. The retro opening credits, stark interiors, washed-out palette and lack of anything even vaguely technological infer that we’re on a ride into glorious, skewed, granular banality, with Paul Giamatti’s pompous, old-fashioned classics professor Paul Hunham the curator and protagonist of this adventure into the now-distant past. Like so many non-heroes of the black comedy genre, it’s his principles that manacle him to a milieu he detests – having refused to give a passing grade to the son of an important donor of his school, he’s sentenced by the headmaster to stay behind with all the boys who couldn’t leave for the Christmas holidays. Apart from the gaggle of misfits under his wing, the only other stayback is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), an African-American woman who lost her son in the ongoing Vietnam war and works at the college as a cafeteria administrator.

Within a week, much to the consternation of the jobsworth Hunham, all of his charges bar one are whisked off by a wealthy parent to a ski resort, leaving him with Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a boy whose mother has just remarried, to a man he doesn’t like. After finally breaking free of their self-enforced campus penury, Hunham gradually emerges from the safety of his comfort zone and actually intersects with the outside world, while bonding with the somewhat damaged yet good-natured Tully. Alongside the duo there is the down to earth and eminently stoic Mary, happy to tag along on their trip to Boston in order to visit her pregnant sister.

And from there, once the unlikely twosome is alone on their aimless road trip, do we learn hidden secrets, backstories and the reason for Hunham’s institutionalisation at the college. What binds them is their mutual recognition of their unhappiness, while desperately clinging to things that are corrosive.

The Holdovers of course isn’t just a paean to the early 70s, but an homage to the cinema of that period, considered by many to be a high point in post-Code, Movie Brat Hollywood. It references several key downbeat movies from that era – Five Easy Pieces, The Last Detail, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Harold and Maude. The restless pit stops, arguments with waiters, references to new age therapy and mental illness are all echoes of those wonderful, era-defining films, as is the soundtrack, which inevitably contains a Cat Stevens song.

Alexander Payne’s style is to casually pull the rug out from under you, and keep things low-key, naturalistic and off-kilter. Bleak dramedies such as this one are his bread and butter, and he certainly wouldn’t have been out of place amongst directors such as Hal Ashby or Bob Rafelson. His signature trope, apart from how enslaved men are to their desires, is that life is messy and rarely has closure. The closest he got to that in one of his films was with The Descendants. As one would expect, there is none of that “Oh Captain, my Captain” emetic, and what sentiment is permitted is barely perceptible even when the two square pegs part company for the last time. In many respects Payne’s work is the antithesis of sloppy, schmaltzy Hollywood formula, and that is primarily why this film works so well. Overall Hunham’s arc was the overriding point of the movie, but there are also subtler, underlying themes here regarding wealth, disconnection, privilege, status and draft avoidance afforded to fortunate sons. Hunham does grow, but as is the case with Payne’s players, he doesn’t really learn from his experience.

The last twelve months have seen many movies that have been praised and hailed as outstanding by critics, but for me this is the pick of the bunch. Nevertheless, I would say that The Holdovers is very good rather than great, and is a tad lightweight, but it does have a lot of positives going for it, not least the brilliant Paul Giamatti, who is for me the best actor of his generation. Kudos as well to newcomer Dominic Sessa, who seamlessly inhabits his role, as well as Da’Vine Joy Randolph, whose understated performance is so expertly nuanced. All three deserve gongs. And as for the esteemed director, all I can say is that I am eagerly awaiting my next visit to Payne’s World.