The Holdovers

 Alexander Payne's The Holdovers (2023) is intentionally anachronistic on several levels.  The movie is set around New Year's 1971; the Vietnam war is still in progress and kids without college deferments are being killed in action. The Holdover's script channels seventies' influences, most notably Hal Ashby's The Last Detail (based on a Robert Towne screenplay and featuring Jack Nicholson) crossed with the somewhat later movies made by John Hughes (The Breakfast Club seems a particular influence.)  The Holdovers posits that an unhappy, if resigned, older man can have a beneficial influence on a selfish youth -- and that the boy's spirit can reinvigorate his mentor and breathe fresh life into him.  I doubt that people in sophisticated circles believe such things today, but this sort of theme was popular in the seventies and eighties and, of course, still has a naive appeal.  Further, Payne devises his movie to imitate the conventions of seventies' filmmaking -- there's the sound of a projector at the outset of the picture and the movie is shot in handsome wintry monochrome using zoom shots, lateral panning motions, and many expressive close-ups; it's a conventional style but absolutely well-calculated for the outdated and (mostly) predictable material that comprises this film.  Payne is an important film-maker but has shown himself to be conventional in technique and subject matter.  The question arises as to why this rather slight, if pleasing, movie was made -- certainly, we don't need another iteration of the story of the curmudgeon humanized by his relationship with a kind  of rebellious waif, a cliche back when George Eliot penned Silas Marner.  (The film set in an expensive New England prep school also reminds me of novel people read in the seventies, but no longer -- John Knowles' A Separate Peace).  Payne has suffered some recent reversals -- his baffling, if ambitious (and unsuccessful) movie Downsizing cast him into some temporary disrepute (people might exclaim:  What was he thinking?) and allegations, very stale to be sure, of statutory rape committed more than 30 years ago, came close to canceling his career.  My surmise is that Payne needed to play it safe, engineer a film that exploits his strong work with actors and conventional plots, and get some scores back on the board.  The Holdovers is perfectly acceptable, modestly entertaining, and good enough for a weekend night -- it's feels fairly long and has, perhaps, too much material in its second half, but I thought it was okay.  It is not, however, in any sense a necessary movie whatever that might mean.

After a half-hour opening act, The Holdovers evolves into a two-hand movie:  Paul Giamatti is a repressed, embittered, and highly intelligent instructor at a private school  He's buttoned-up and disliked by everyone at the Boy's School where he has taught for the last thirty years (after attending the place when he was in prep school himself).  According to the conventions of this sort of screenplay, Giamatti as Mr. Hunman is the sort of character to whom nothing interesting can ever occur -- until, that is, something happens to dislodge him from his ordinary, stifling routines.  Angus Tully is a rebellious 17 year old, one of Hunman's students in his class on Ancient Civilizations (for the purposes of the movie, Hunman is basically something like a Latin and Greek teacher),  Tully announces in the opening scenes that he is excited about a trip to St. Kitts with his parents over the Christmas Break.  As soon as he tells everyone that he is headed to the tropics, of course, alert members in the audience know that he will go to no such place, and, indeed, find himself trapped with Hunman over the holidays.  When school is dismissed for the semester, Tully, in fact, learns from his mother that she is going on a honeymoon with his stepfather and that he has been abandoned over Christmas vacation.  Hunman is being punished for failing the son of a prominent benefactor of the private boy's school -- as a penalty for his arrogance and disobedience, he's condemned to babysit Tully (and, intially, four other boys) over the break.  There's some interesting and poignant byplay between the other kids and Hunman / Tully:  two of the older boys clash with Tully and there's a fight; one of these kids is overtly vicious and, probably, a psychopath.  The two younger boys are also interesting:  one is a straitlaced Mormon kid and the other is a Korean child too far away from home to be returned to his home country (this poor boy is also a bedwetter and intensely homesick).  This cast of characters is literally whisked away in a surprising plot development about a half-hour into the movie and the story, then, focuses on the fraught relationship between Tully and Hunman.  A couple of subplots complicate the action:  there's a pretty administrative assistant to the noxious Headmaster, implying, perhaps, a romantic relationship between Hunman and this woman.  A Black manager of the cafeteria is crippled by grief for her son who died in Vietnam.  She tries to conceal her sorrow but its gets the better of her.  A series of misadventures, construed as mildly comic, ensue:  Tully gets hurt defying Hunman and has to go to the emergency room (his shoulder is dislocated); at a Christmas party, the cafeteria manager and head chef gets drunk and belligerent and breaks down; Hunman's desire for love and romance, a yearning so repressed that he can't acknowledge it even to himself, is thwarted and, in the show's fourth act (of five), Hunman and Tully go to Boston where they have several other encounters with minor characters.  Of course, a movie like this requires that surprising and painful secrets be divulged and, of course, this occurs in due course.  These events, rather implausibly, result in Hunman's discharge from the school -- something that may be a blessing in disguise in light of the fact that his work at the place has crippled the older man's life and emotional responses to things.  Tully seems to have become a better man as a result of the adventures with the witty, emotionally stunted Hunman.  

All of this (except I think Hunman's firing) plays out convincingly in a minor key.  Colors and events are muted.  There is a moving close-up of Giamatti's face when he learns that his unexpressed, but nascent desire for the boss' pretty secretary can not be realized.  The mixture of self-contempt, sorrow, and relief on his face is perfectly depicted.  The movie has a lot of bad language that would probably not be accepted in a movie made in the seventies or earlier eighties and we are reminded that people smoked a lot in that period -- the cook, for instance, generally has a cigarette dangling from her lip.  On the other hand, movies in the seventies and early eighties were more bawdy, had more nudity and sexual content.  Payne decorously avoids sex in the film and the picture is mostly chaste.  The Holdovers is, as they say, life-affirming, has a good script (and an interesting soundtrack of seventies folksongs), and is beautifully acted. It's the sort of picture, a success d'estime, that predictably garners a lot of award nominations (but doesn't win in most categories).  I thought it was good but not completely interesting.  However, I hope the critical success of this movie will free Alexander Payne to direct something more exciting in the near future.  

(One of Hunman's foibles is that he has a box full of volumes of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations, a book that he gives to people when he needs to make a gift -- it's his all-purpose gift and he doesn't really care if the book is appropriate for the person to whom he gave it.  One of my very good friends, now deceased, was a prominent college teacher in town and, also, admired Marcus Aurelius.  He was also always giving people copies of the Meditations, a text that he thought would calm its readers into stoic acceptance of things as they are.  But, often, he was unrealistically idealistic about the influence of the book.  If you are seriously distressed or mentally ill, Marcus Aurelius will not penetrate to the heart of your misery.  In The Holdovers, we see that there are aspects of human suffering that can't be assuaged by aphorisms in Latin.  Nonetheless, I always admired my friend for relying on the Meditations as a sort of vade mecum; the remedy was true to him and his spirit and I respected it.)