A review of the new movie “The Holdovers”
The odd title refers to those students and staff at an exclusive boys boarding school in New England who are forced to stay behind at Christmas 1970 when everyone else leaves for family and fun. An accomplished director, a brilliant script and three stand-out performances make this comedy-drama a thoroughly enjoyable film that swings back and forth between humour and pathos with ultimately a message of revelation and redemption.The director is Alexander Payne, a man with a distinctive style who has previously given us such successes as “About Schmidt”, “Sideways” and “The Descendants”, but had not had a hit in a while. A recurrent theme in many of his movies is disappointment and here we have that emotion in spades. The scriptwriter is David Hemingson and this is his first writing for the cinema. There are some wonderful one-line zingers (“I thought all the Nazis were in Argentina”) but it is the subtle integration of comedy and sadness that marks this out as superb storytelling.
The lead actor is the one-off Paul Giametti who worked with Payne in “Sideways”. Here he plays an acerbic and bitter classics teacher who does not care what students and faculty think of him as he holds to his own standards. Dominic Sessa impresses in a sensitive first appearance in film as the last student left as everyone else finds somewhere else to go. To complete the golden trilogy of this cast is Da’Vine Joy Randolph as the bereaved head cook who, in spite of her different class, colour and body, brings teacher and pupil together while finding her own sense of escape from the pain of life.
Along the way in this entertaining and moving winter of discontent, you’ll learn why Father Christmas is a false image for the season and how classical history gave us the word punitive.