The Holdovers is a pretty amusing and sometimes moving film about a curmudgeonly teacher tasked with supervising a group of students at a prep school who are not going to spend Christmas holidays with their families for various reasons. Of course, there is one student in which the teacher reluctantly becomes to form a bond.
Alexander Payne directed this movie which was written by David Hemingson. Paul Giamatti is in the lead role as Paul Hunham. Other cast members include Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Carrie Preston, and Brady Hepner.
The film takes place in 1970 at a boarding school in New England where a very strict, yet strangely witty teacher is almost universally despised by both students and faculty. The Christmas holidays come up, and five students are unable to return home, and Mr. Hunham is tasked with supervising them alongside the school head cook, who is grieving the recent loss of a son. When one of the wealthy fathers is able to collect all but one of the boys, Angus Tully is left as the sole student left in Hunham’s care. Hunham and Angus begin a tumultuous journey in which they start to understand each other’s disappointments as their emotional walls begin to crack.
Giamatti puts in a typically engaging performance. I had not really heard of Dominic Sessa before this film, but I have to say that I was pretty impressed with his approach to the role. There is something of an understated realism to his performance as the troubled Angus Tully. Angus’s antics are a strange yet effective blend of something amusing and tragic. A major revelation about his lineage comes out which does succeed in making Tully more sympathetic than expected.
Randolph is also impressive as a kind of moral center for Hunham and is instrumental as a bridge between two stubborn and broken people. She also has a gift of effective delivery of some pretty tight zingers.
The film was quite well cast, and Giamatti knows how to work with good writing. The actors portraying the students were pretty good if somewhat unimaginative. You had the nervous guys and the bullies. Angus was the more interesting one as intended. He even shows moments of compassion in spite of his hostility.
The film does feel a little long at times, but the characters were more complicated and layered than many in this genre. There isn’t much that is new in the basic plot, but the familiar elements are put to good use, and it seems the right people were cast. The film even managed to throw out a few surprising twists, and that seems to be an ever-decreasing feat that Hollywood is able to accomplish.
