The Holdovers (2023) ***

 

From director Alexander Payne and star Paul Giamatti, the team that brought us the brilliant “Sideways,” we now have “The Holdovers,” a thoughtful, funny, sometimes overly-sweet film about a bunch of misfits forming an unlikely family.

Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, a grumpy, cross-eyed antiquities teacher at the toney Barton academy, a New England boarding school for boys. Unpopular with the students, faculty, and administration, Hunham gets stuck with the job of staying at school over the holidays to look after the handful of boys who have nowhere to go over the Christmas break, the “holdovers.” You might think that Hunham wouldn't mind the job that much. He lives on campus, and with no family, he has no travel plans. In fact, Hunham has never really gone anywhere. He went from being a student at Barton (on scholarship) to teaching there, and he seems destined to live out his lonely life being grumpy there.

Hunham sees a bit of himself in one of the boys. Angus (Dominic Sessa) is bright but socially awkward. He is also unpopular at Barton, and his status as a holiday holdover is extra painful because he was dropped at the last minute from his family's beach vacation. The other holdover boys are a mixed bag of various ages and backgrounds. With frigid weather outside, and an unsympathetic Mr. Hunham inside, the boys prepare to spend an unhappy holiday.

Director Alexander Payne is known for his clever, often darkly funny, character studies, including “Citizen Ruth”, “Election”, and “Sideways”. “The Holdovers” is interesting not because exciting things happen, but because of the glimpse it gives you of characters you might not normally pay attention to: the grumpy teacher, the awkward student, and the quiet cook who lost her son to Vietnam (Da'Vine Joy Randolph).

There are people of a certain age for whom “Dead Poets Society” was their favorite movie growing up. Now that they are adults, “The Holdovers” should be their new favorite. Like “Dead Poets”, “The Holdovers” is about a teacher whose integrity gets him into trouble, but who winds up inspiring at least one of his students. “The Holdovers” does not get as melodramatically dark as “Dead Poets”, but its tone throughout is more melancholy, its characters more complex, and its hero harder to warm up to. Like “Dead Poets”, “The Holdovers” crosses the line from emotional to treacly at times.

The film is worth seeing for the excellent performances by Paul Giamatti and young co-star Dominic Sessa, and for the Oscar-winning supporting performance by Da'Vine Joy Randolph. Still, Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti have done better. If you saw”Sideways,” you know that wine-themed movie was like a fine pinot noir - subtle, complex, something you want to revisit again and again. “The Holdovers” is more like a merlot - pleasant but basic.

3 stars out of 5