The Frailty Behind “The Holdovers”
Alexander Payne’s new movie examines dignity at a New England prep school campus. Not your “Goodbye, Mr. Chips.”
Fifty-odd days before Christmas (forty before Hanukkah) and American moviegoers received a gift: “The Holdovers,” opened in a theater near you, October 27.
Rarely have I seen a movie that neither, one, ends up satirizing itself nor two, takes itself way too seriously. Rarely have I seen a movie that doesn’t avoid issues of class and privilege. Rarely have I seen a movie that doesn’t avoid otherness. Rarely have I seen a movie that dares to expose frailty or dignity or both.
Bravo, Mr. Alexander Payne, you showed me.
Pathos is the game afoot in the three Payne directed movies I’ve seen. We are stuck with main characters in “About Schmidt,” “Sideways,” and now “The Holdovers,” who are on a trajectory of self discovery. The pace is relentless, something Paul Giamatti adeptly serves, as chief protagonist in “Sideways,” (2004) and now in “The Holdovers.” (2023)
Against a backdrop of annoying privilege tempered with a dose of annoying Santa-land — we are in snowy New England — we meet Paul Dunham played by Giamatti, whom we need to be convinced, everybody hates. Behold, we are at a tweedy boarding school with an array of misfits. Remarkably the conceit works — we are won over — and we grow to singularly like disliking Mr. Dunham.
Meanwhile, the external world gradually invades the drama bubble Payne has erected. The game unfolds, courtesy of a ruse by a colleague which secures Dunham his assignment as in loco parentis for holiday “holdovers,” who are forced to stay at school. And unfolds courtesy of an appearance by one schoolmate Daddy’s helicopter which whisks away most of the misfit tribe. This leaves a trio plucked from Greek theater — the protagonist, played by Giamatti, the chorus in the form of a school cook, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph and the antagonist, played by Dominic Sesse who at age 17 and a Deerfield Academy preppie turned “real deal,” deftly foils Dunham’s every move to dictate the outcome.
One contrivance after another traipse across the screen. My movie mate who usually can pick apart every cineaste-constructed detail, has tears streaming down her face, testimony to Payne’s clairvoyance.
In the aforementioned Payne trio I can recall, is a lurching from imaging to imaging as contrivance after contrivance pile up. In “The Holdovers,” there is a “field trip” to Boston, a colleague’s Christmas Party, a family secret revealed — to name a few — and Giamatti’s character, Odysseus-like, is tested every step of the way.
Things finally come to a head in a stunning denouement. No spoiler alert needed: we are prepared; we’ve graduated.
And we’re transformed.
November 9
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