Alexander Payne’s films tend to focus on people who think more highly of themselves, or so it seems to everyone around them. Delusions of grandeur, haughty intolerance, and disgust often give way to compassion and empathy. And that has never been more true than with his glorious new film The Holdovers.
The Holdovers was ready to go last year, or so the rumors said. But it was “held over” and launched this year as a World Premiere for Telluride’s 50th anniversary. Payne told a packed house at the Herzog Theater that the Telluride Film Festival was significant in his career as a filmmaker. This year’s Telluride has very little in the way of star power, which is usually at least part of the draw. But it is true that without actors and actresses in attendance, the movies must stand alone, without the added lift that up-close charisma brings to a screening.
What a surprise this movie is, particularly in Paul Giamatti’s fully realized, absolutely hilarious protagonist Paul Hunham (a last name that kind of looks like “Human” but isn’t). He has a lazy eye, is afflicted with a fishy smell from a medical disorder, and spends his time torturing his students at Barton Academy, a prestigious prep school on the East Coast.
Barton is a Ivy League pipeline for children of the rich to make their way through life the easy way. But the film’s three main characters don’t have it so easy. Paul’s friend on campus is Mary Lamb (a knock-out performance by Da’Vine Joy Randolph), whose only son was killed in Vietnam. Lamb had taken a job at the school to afford his tuition. He was an excellent student, but unlike the luckier rich kids at the school, he couldn’t dodge the draft.
Paul’s nemesis at first is the solitary student left behind over the holidays that Paul must attend to, Angus Tully (yet another strong performance by newcomer Dominic Sessa). Tully has been abandoned by his indifferent mother and her new husband, who have chosen to honeymoon instead. Tully has been kicked out of several other schools, and his behavior at Barton will determine whether he gets to stay or is sent off to military school.
This is the kind of set-up that used to drive the kinds of screenplays that frequently got made in Hollywood. This is also why collaborations are often (at least to me) preferable to films written and directed by the same person. That can be of value too, but it’s rare that one person is able to do both things really well.
David Hemingson is an outstanding writer whose attention to detail here is evident in the sharp dialogue and in the dramatic arcs of each character — something we rarely see anymore because there is no real pressure to write screenplays like this anymore. Anyone who has ever wanted to write a screenplay and sell in Hollywood (someone once said there are more screenwriters than people in Los Angeles) knows that whole books have been written, classes taught, and theories invented about what makes a great screenplay. So many good ones are floating around, yet so few are made. It’s a miracle that this one did.
Payne has built a film canon full of isolated, lonely characters who invite us into their world. As rigid and frozen as they often seem, by the end of the films, they’ve thawed out just enough to be human. What I love and appreciate about his work, as a writer and a director, is that he understands what so few people do about us complicated people: most of us lack the requisite self-awareness to change.
The payoff in most of his films is that these brittle, offensive, and sometimes cruel characters are decent at their core, which is something we need to be reminded of — especially in times like these, where we have justified our hatred of other people by convincing ourselves we’re on the right fight, we’re the “good” people and those people over there are the “bad” people.
Giamatti has never been better. He is always great, of course, and Miles in Sideways was his best role until The Holdovers. If fear drove Miles in Sideways — fear of success, fear of love, fear of sobriety — the bitterness of failure drives Paul in The Holdovers. Because this is a masterful screenplay, by the film’s end we know Paul’s entire story (which I won’t give away here). But it isn’t so much that he has to confront the truth about himself, but rather he must find a way to make peace with the people he has conditioned himself to see as “the enemy”: spoiled, rich, entitled brats who get everything handed to them on a silver platter and can’t be bothered to struggle.
That the film is set in 1970-1971 is significant, if you know your history. Thankfully — and we should all drop to our knees in gratitude for this — there is no politics or “wokeness” to speak of. This is the time of Nixon heading into re-election versus the counter-culture, and of course anyone who knows Nixon’s story knows he too was bitter about JFK being a Harvard brat and how Nixon had to work hard for everything he had (the cloth coat, etc). But none of that makes it into this movie, except the point that some young men had to fight and die in a useless war while others didn’t.
Paul shows kindness to people like Mary, to those he believes he can trust because they don’t come from wealth and privilege, but the film never once addresses race or racism, to its credit. Mary is given a complete story on her own, with some of the film’s best lines — her whole past and even her present is explored in the film. She wasn’t just the Black cook at the school to illustrate racism, as one would expect in a movie in 2023. Like all of the characters in the film, she is a memorable person whose story matters. And Randolph is spectacular in this.
At some point during The Holdovers, I started crying and couldn’t really stop until the film’s end. Payne has made his most sentimental film to date, which says a lot for a guy whose career has been built on characters that keep us at arm’s length. Not here. They bring us in for a warm embrace. They allow for each of the characters to have moments of vulnerability, of making stupid mistakes, of doing dumb things, and then eventually reaching their limit where the only thing left to do is give in.
We leave the film with these characters, fully realized, living inside our minds and our hearts as though we met them and know them. Each of them so clearly defined, no person who watched this movie would have a hard time explaining the story and would be able to remember every scene, from the smallest details (like what they ate at a diner) to the broader themes about people who choose to hide rather than live their lives.
Characters in movies now often are written with shortcuts to sympathy because they fit into a certain category or they’re afflicted with some kind of mental illness that defines who they are. It’s much harder to tell stories about ordinary people living out their lives. That makes this movie one that requires no kind of prior knowledge or in-the-know ideology — it’s simply a great story, well-told.
Hatred is an easy emotion to slip into. It can feel so good to be mean to other people, especially if we’ve convinced ourselves it’s justified. I saw one review of this movie that called it “imperfect” and another tweet that said something similar. That annoyed me to no end and was a reminder of why too many films have sucked so badly lately. We just don’t seem to have built a system that enriches and cultivates the best of them. But then I remember how easy it is to become a character in an Alexander Payne movie. How easy it is to cut yourself off from other people because they disappoint you or annoy you or enrage you.
Maybe, just maybe, you see a movie that leaves you changed. And you’re no longer Mr. Potter hiding the bank deposit and forcing George Bailey to humiliate himself. Now you’re Bailey himself, running through Bedford Falls, grateful for all of the good things on offer. The Holdovers is that movie too. It’s one that entire families could see and enjoy at Christmastime, as long as the gatekeepers keep that gate unlocked. It might sound corny or sappy, but now we know what it’s like to live without it. We know what it’s like to miss it. It’s that ancient concept that never dies: catharsis.
This is just not something we see every day in Hollywood, much less the Oscar race. But we need it. We need it as people. We need it as a country.
