School Daze with The Holdovers

 I’m someone who has only a small degree oftolerance for Christmas music.  Two weeksbefore Thanksgiving, I used up my entire 2023 quota (“The Little Drummer Boy”! BabyJesus songs!) watching The Holdovers. Not that this newest AlexanderPayne film is all sweetness and light; Payne’s cynicism about the way folkscope with the human condition undercuts the saccharine nature of his score. ButI’m still trying to decide how I feel about this latest entry in theboys-at-a-boarding-school genre. (Think Rushmore, The Dead Poet’sSociety, A Separate Peace . . .) The reviewer at the New York Timesadored The Holdovers, using it as a jumping off point for his own verymixed personal memories. The reviewer at the Los Angeles Times hated it,accusing Payne of insincerity, and worse. Me? I found it appealing in its bestmoments and over-calculated in its worst. I liked these characters, butcouldn’t bring myself to accept their reality.

 Paul Giamatti, who shone inPayne’s 2004 Sideways, is something of a specialist in playing morosemen who can’t quite accommodate to their own time and place. Somewhat like thelate Wilford Brimley, he seems never to have been young. As a hapless wineconnoisseur in Sideways, he came off as emphatically middle-aged when hewas still in his thirties. Now he’s aged into the role of a longtime teacher ofancient history at a tony New England prep school where most of the boys (intheir jackets and ties and floppy 1970s hair) have grown up expectingwinter-break Caribbean vacations and easy coasting into Ivy League colleges.(Giamatti, the son of a former president of Yale who later became theCommissioner of Major League Baseball, has had his own prep school experience,so he knows the drill.) In The Holdovers he’s fitted out with a cuttingwit, a secret sorrow, and a series of small physical afflictions that make himunpleasant company to just about everyone. There is about him from the start,though, a quiet sweetness that I wasn’t expecting, especially in his treatmentof the campus’s few women.

 One of them, Mary Lamb, isthe head of the school’s  cooking staff.  Like Giamatti’s Paul Hunham, she’s stuck oncampus during winter break. And she too has a sorrow, though it’s hardly asecret: her only child, a highly promising graduate of the school, has justbeen killed in Vietnam. As movingly played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Mary isboth sweet and sour: happily, the script doesn’t allow her to be merely asad-faced bereaved mom. The Vietnam angle does take us by surprise, becausethere’s little sense that this story is set back in time. But perhaps that’saccurate: on this campus, among these well-parented young men, an overseas waris hardly top of mind. Hell, no—they have no intention of going . . . and theirparents will see that their draft boards stay far, far away.

Thethird member of the trio left behind at Christmas is a first-time movie actorwho makes an impressive debut here. Dominic Sessa, an actual prep school grad(class of ’22) plays the classic smart but angry kid with no friends and nofamily to rely on. Naturally, he and Mr. Hunham develop a prickly butunmistakable bond, one that will take an unexpected turn late in the film. I’ma bit Scrooge-ish about the outcome, but Payne’s sympathy for the walkingwounded remains very much intact. (There’s one more such character in the filmthat I deliberately haven’t mentioned, but suffice it to say that Payne is verywell-named.)