Everybody hurts.
It's Christmas 1970, somewhere in New England, at a boarding school for rich, young, white men. For some of them, reality and Vietnam, like the snow, are edging ever closer.
In The Holdovers, writer David Hemingson and director Alexander Payne's gentle but sincere seasonal tale of redemption, Paul Giamatti plays the Scrooge-like figure of grumpy, uncompromising Classics teacher Paul Hunham. Like Scrooge, the failures and setbacks of Hunham's life have left him vindictive, stubborn and isolated. Over a Christmas break he may not be visited by three ghosts, but he certainly has three out-of-school experiences (visits to a hospital, a party and a city) which combine to turn the curmudgeon into a creature of compassion.
Giamatti’s spirit guide on this journey is Angus Tully, a Year 12 student abandoned by his parents for the vacation, played by the disarmingly irresistible Dominic Sessa. He may not be Tiny Tim, but he too is afflicted, here not by disease but parental indifference. Also along for the ride is recently bereaved school cook Mary (the brilliant Da’Vine Randolph). The three of them are damaged, hurting and, in their own discrete ways, stripped of love.
Whether it’s The Browning Version, Goodbye Mr Chips, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or the execrable Dead Poets Society, films about inspiring teachers are all too common. What’s rarer is a film about a slightly rubbish teacher. In The Holdovers, Hunham thinks he’s a bastion of educational standards, a lone voice against a rising tide of Ivy League nepotism. But the truth is, everyone hates him. His arc from hermit to hero is predictable, but it is handled with such tenderness that, like driving to a favourite holiday location, the predictability if anything adds to its appeal. And watching these characters start to rediscover emotional connection, like snails timidly groping with their antennae, somehow avoids sentimentality and becomes deeply moving.
In a society where competition, bullying and privilege are the norm, tiny expressions of affection have enormous power. And so, in The Holdovers, the gift of some home-made biscuits, a simple kiss, a pair of sisters sharing a joke, these humble signifiers of human warmth reach out of the screen and melt your heart. School cook Mary in particular exposes the shortcomings of a society still riven with racist advantage. A black woman with no financial muscle, she couldn’t afford to send her son to college, so he was sent to Vietnam, and returned in a coffin.
Director Payne revels in the period look and feel of the early 70s, meticulously recreated in cars, clothes, and even bowling alleys. It certainly avoids the cynicism of more recent years, and the opening idents, including the BBFC ‘AA’ rating, are all pure 1970. Even the aspect ratio eschews today’s widescreen proportions, and sticks to the more modest 16:9 of those pre-digital days. One of the more intriguing credits in the opening titles is ‘Head of Hair’ Michael White. But it soon becomes clear that Mr White had his work cut out in this film. The hair, considering most of the cast is teenage boys, is phenomenal: flowing, stylishly unkempt, hippie-inflected and rigorously unmilitary.
But the star of the show is Giamatti. Reuniting with Payne for the first time since the multi-award-winning Sideways (2004), he turns what could so easily be a stock character into a human being whose past is never fully revealed, but whose pain, concealed beneath layers of Ancient Greek history, is only too obvious. If Barbie was too pink, and Oppenheimer was too pretentious, try The Holdovers. It’s just right.