Even when a student does well in his classics course, they don’t escape Hunham’s derision. Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) gets the best grades but he seems to rankle Hunham more than most. Tully is one of a handful of students who, over the holiday break, are unable to return home and therefore must stay at the school with a designated staff chaperone. Hunham, in the administration doghouse after refusing to change the grade of a Senator’s son, gets stuck as the chaperone, to his, Tully’s, and everyone else’s displeasure. When the other holdover students are invited on a ski trip, Tully is the only one who can’t get ahold of his mother, as she’s out of the country on her honeymoon, and is forced to be alone at the school with Hunham and cafeteria manager Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) whose son was recently killed in Vietnam. Having now formed a dour trio of unwanted teenager, grieving mother, and cantankerous man, there’s nowhere for their relationships to go but up.
What keeps the inevitable rapprochements and backstories and recognitions of each other’s deeper humanity from getting corny or predictable is how believable the main cast is. Giamatti is another New Hollywood throwback in a film full of them, an idiosyncratic-looking man who nevertheless is a movie star, and he takes the opportunity of one of the best roles of his career to make the viewer wonder what’s been lost by all the chicken breast and steroid crash diets that make leading men all look identical. His face and its myriad reaction shots is worth all the beefcake in the world. Randolph doesn’t overplay her character’s pathos while Sessa covers his character’s dread about the future with a defiant frankness and impishness, though the character’s a worse actor than acclaimed newcomer Sessa is. Despite their shared loneliness and alienation, all three are foundationally decent, and the world of the film, clogged as it is with unearned privilege and entitlement, gives them chances to not be. Each of their lives is marked by bone-deep unfairness, and the film is largely about taking that unfairness and resisting the urge to feed it back to the world. Several 2023 films were about the world that the characters decide to make for themselves, from Japanese sensations Boy and the Heron and Godzilla Minus One to Best Picture winner Oppenheimer, and The Holdovers sits right alongside them.
It’s the little things in the Holdovers that most herald Payne’s glorious return. The centerpiece diamond-honed shot of Payne’s career remains Matthew Broderick washing his balls in Election. The man knows when to let a scene play out. The Holdovers has lots of these moments, from Hunham letting waves of recognition wash over his face to the body language of Lamb sitting with her sister. Hunham stresses to Tully at one point that in studying history, one can find an exact replica of anyone’s present problems and concerns. Everything within human experience has already been experienced. That may well be true, but when it’s viewed by a director who is as keen an observer of humanity as Payne is, he can make it feel brand new. A