I needed some time to process The Holdovers, and I was working all day.
Alexander Payne has been one of my favorite moviemakers for a long time. He's among the best in cinema history at exploring small, personal American stories that navigate their subject matter with a healthy balance of humor and tragedy. I'll never forget seeing About Schmidt for the first time and laughing my ass off every time I heard "Dear Ndugu" and crying my eyes out at the end.
The Holdovers is one of Payne's better movies.
The movie is set in during the Christmas of 1970.
Paul Giamatti plays a familiar role in Paul Hunham -- an older teacher, a man who is smart as a whip while being generally disliked. He's single, and the success that he's had has fallen dramatically short of his aspirations and potential. He's teaching at the same private, catholic high school that he attended in his youth.
The school is packed with spoiled rich kids, and he's one of the few teachers who won't play ball in boosting the kids' grades. He fails the son of a senator who donated a wing to the school; so, as punishment, he gets stuck with watching over the kids with nowhere to go over the Christmas and New Years break.
One of the holdovers is Angus, a smart kid with emotional and disciplinary issues. He's also disliked by his classmates. The first time we see him open his mouth, the result is him depriving his classmates of a chance at a retest.
Angus comes from a broken home, and his mother and stepfather decide to stick him at the school over break at the last minute.
Among the holdovers is Mary, the cook for the school, in an Oscar-worthy performance from Da'Vine Joy Randolph, whose son attended the school only to become KIA in Vietnam.
The dynamics between the three central characters set a foundation for an affecting and complex character drama.
Everybody grows. The stakes for (particularly) Paul and Angus become clearer as the film continues.
The ending was every bit as bittersweet as Payne's previous film like About Schmidt, Sideways, and Nebraska.
It should receive some Oscar recognition. It's probably on my list of the top five of movies of the year, and it's been a pretty good year.