The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023)

I wanted to adore The Holdovers. This is the kind of warm, cozy film I can imagine someone keeping on in the background during that odd interzone between Christmas and New Year's Eve when those lucky enough to be off work have no clue what to do with themselves. Indeed, The Holdovers takes place across that very week when Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, gangly and totes adorbs) gets held over for the holidays with several other unfortunate students at the New England boarding school they attend. Largely as a result of his curmudgeonly behavior, classics professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is tasked with supervising the holdovers and much tension arises when he expects diligent study from the misfits under his care. Payne, along with screenwriter David Hemingson and cinematographer Eigil Bryld, deserve whatever Oscar nods may come their way for evoking moments when something could happen. With an empty campus as their canvas, the film's architects paint situations pregnant with possibility, to quote Margo Channing in a film underestimated for its warmth, including the possibility of sitting on your ass and doing nothing at all.

Would that the film progressed in such a lazy fashion. But alas, the lash of narrative progression must strike down upon us. It's ye olde vertically compelling, horizontally moribund problem of mainstream cinema once more. In a crusty deus ex machina, the group of holdovers gets broken up when one student's rich father arrives on campus via helicopter and airlifts all of the the boys save Angus to a ski trip. That leaves Angus alone with Paul as both Come To Terms With Things and Payne abandons the polyphonic density of, say, Paul Thomas Anderson's greatest film Licorice Pizza (2021) for story beats that march forward in lockstep. In a career-defining performance I hope/predict will earn her an Oscar, Da'Vine Joy Randolph airs out the proceedings a bit as Mary Lamb, a cook mourning the loss of her son in the Vietnam War. But the depth she provides is not enough to swerve away from the predictable spectacle of Paul finding a heart and Angus learning valuable lessons on the cusp of adulthood. Still, I expect to enjoy The Holdovers in fitful chunks around 2038 on whatever streamer is left standing long after they've all adopted ad-supported plans.

Grade: B+