THE HOLDOVERS IS a well written (there are some hilarious zingers) and, helmed by the always watchable Paul Giamatti, wonderfully well-acted movie. I can see why it’s so well-liked by so many critics. The title refers to that lonely group of pupils at an expensive boarding school who, for a variety of reasons, are forced to spend the Christmas holidays in the school. Paul (the Giamatti character), a much-loathed teacher, has been dragooned into the role of babysitter, along with Mary (Da Vine Joy Randolph), the head cook.
Paul is a curmudgeonly, sarcastic pedant, whose relationship with his students shows no trace of human warmth or empathy. Mary is a matronly mother hen, still grieving over the death of her son (in Viet Nam…the period during which the movie is set). Because his parents have gone AWOL, Angus (Dominic Sessa) is the rebellious, much-expelled student; the last holdover stuck with the company of this teacher he despises.
It doesn’t take a genius to write the arc of the story from here: you just know we’re going to be courted to look deeper and feel their pain; that the heartless shall become full of heart and that the rebel will be an angel in disguise. True to form, Paul, the heartless teacher’s heartlessness is explored and we discover that it’s all a shield against a disappointed life. The rebellious student’s rebelliousness is also revealed as a shield; he’s a bright, thoughtful person. And the conscience figure of Mary (Shall we call her Hail Mary?) is more a racial stereotype than a real person: the Black mama as quasi saint; font of empathy and homely wisdom.
It all feels like a Hollywood slight of hand: “to know me is to love me”…the people you thought were horrible are really OK after all.
Layers of cliche and sentimentality are, fortunately, tempered by the story’s focus on the entitlement of the rich. Paul is the lonely, Quixotic figure that lunges at the status quo; one where money and donations offer a free-pass for lazy, not particularly bright kids en route, undeservingly, to their Ivy League futures. His type, the pedant who still cherishes an idea of education as an ennobling force, where an exam pass not a free pass matters, will, it is implied, always be an object of derision. His is a belief system out of step with the reality of the ‘real world’ compromised by a need for more cash. There can be no happy ever after endings.
The movie is engaging intellectually. And vomit-inducing emotionally. It is a rich idea undermined by the cheap sentimentality at its heart
THE HOLDOVERS. Dir: Alexander Payne (The Descendants, Election). Writer: David Hemmington (How I met Your Mother). With: Paul Giamatti, Da Vine Joy Randolph (Only Murders in the Building, The Lost City), Dominic Sessa. Cinematographer: Eigil Bryld (No Hard Feelings)
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