Photo © Miramax
The Holdovers
Dominic Sessa and Paul Giamatti in ‘The Holdovers’
Paul Giamatti has often been cast as an officious functionary, but director Alexander Payne has chosen to explore the sad-eyed actor’s potential as a well-meaning loser. Giamatti played that part in Sideways as a failed writer and wine snob. He stars in Payne’s new film, The Holdovers, as Paul Hunham, lecturer in classics at Barton Academy. The New England prep school’s Jeffersonian architecture spreads out across a wooded landscape; the boys wear jackets and ties and attend chapel. It’s old school and it’s 1970, days before the Christmas break begins. Some of the boys smoke pot, but little had changed from the past century.
You wouldn’t be mistaken for mishearing Hunham as Humdrum. He lives in cramped quarters, grading essay exams, mumbling “Philistine” under his breath; pausing to draw from his pipe, he scrawls another bad grade on another paper. “Rancid little Philistines,” he adds. He’s a shy, irritable man, and socially awkward. When the academy’s secretary presents him with a tray of homemade Christmas cookies, he stares as if an alien object had fallen from the sky.
Unlike some faculty, Hunham is a stickler for grades. He’s punished for flunking a senator’s son by being forced to stay at the academy over the Christmas break (“It’s not as though you had plans to leave campus,” the headmaster snickers) to supervise the “holdovers,” the boys who have nowhere to go for the holidays. Eventually, only one student is left in his charge, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a bright and haughty lad despondent upon learning that mom and his new stepfather are holidaying in the sun without him. For most of the holidays, Hunham, Angus and the school’s cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), are left to themselves on the snowy campus.
The Holdovers slowly peels away the depths of the three main characters during a chain of unanticipated, often comical mishaps. Hunham is an ineffectual tyrant whose punitive measures—he stops to remind Angus of the Punic Wars—fail to keep the boy in line. He’s lonely and assumes he’s unattractive; he wields his knowledge like a club to put down those around him and shield his fragile self-regard. Eventually we learn he was a scholarship kid expelled from Harvard when the college took the word of a legacy student over his. Hunham was forced to teach the children of the social class above his own station at a school he regarded as an academic backwater. His bitterness becomes sympathetic.
Race enters the picture with Mary. A Black woman of faith, she possesses a more generous spirit than Hunham, whose reliance on Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Stoic, helps him endure without granting him hope. Mary’s son had been allowed to attend Barton; despite good grades, there was no money to send him on to college and as a result, he was drafted, sent to Vietnam, and died there. Family money and social privilege haven’t brought happiness to Angus, who suffers many anxieties, including the fear that mediocre grades will keep him from college and cost him his draft deferment. However, he has a bigger heart than his classmates and refuses to bully the minorities in their midst, a Mormon and a Korean.
Hunham and Angus dislike each other profoundly during the film’s first third, but circumstances draw them together as they tell fibs to protect each other. It’s not a smooth but a prickly path to mutual understanding. They have things to teach each other. Angus learns that the past determines the present and Hunham learns to a mensch. With The Holdovers, Payne has mixed a bittersweet holiday cocktail—lots of bitters and little sugar.
