The Holdovers review – brilliant Paul Giamatti hits the happy/sad sweet spot

The year’s best Christmas movie arrives in the UK a bit late for Christmas: it is a genial, gentle, redemptive dramedy from Alexander Payne which hits the happy/sad sweet spot with Payne’s sure aim. It is taken from TV writer David Hemingson’s impeccably crafted screenplay, a masterclass in incremental, indirect character revelations and plot transitions. The Holdovers is set in 1970, consciously (or maybe self-consciously) crafted to look like a film which its characters could have gone to see at the time, with the funny, rueful dialogue and melancholy sense of place that you might find in something by Hal Ashby or Bob Rafelson, and a madeleine soundtrack from Cat Stevens, Labi Siffre and more.

But of course it also looks like an Alexander Payne movie, with the spiky intergenerational negotiation, the road movie sadness, the odd-couple energy and the not-so-private life of a humiliated schoolteacher. Paul Giamatti plays Mr Hunham, a cantankerous classics master at a New England boys’ boarding school where he himself was once a pupil; he is a stickler for discipline and academic standards, nicknamed “Wall-Eye” due to his lazy eye. He is unmarried and lives at the school himself. With exquisite melancholy and cruelty, the film shows how he is in the same state of arrested-development bachelorhood as his pupils, but with squalor and disillusionment in his case considerably well advanced. Like Giamatti’s character in Payne’s film Sideways, Hunham is a drinker, though without any pretensions to connoisseurship. Like Matthew Broderick’s teacher in Payne’s Election, or indeed Reese Witherspoon’s character in Payne’s upcoming Election sequel Tracy Flick Can’t Win, Hunham has learned to absorb disappointment and frustration as part of the teacher’s working life.

He is loathed by almost everyone, especially the principal Dr Woodrup (Andrew Garman), who is furious at Hunham for flunking one of the richest boys and having the bad taste to insist on real grades for real academic work – thus ruining this stupid and entitled brat’s chance at an Ivy League school and ending any chance at more donations from his wealthy father. To punish him, Dr Woodrup contrives to make Hunham look after the “holdovers”, the pupils who can’t get home for the Christmas holidays, including an angry, self-laceratingly unhappy boy called Angus, played by a remarkably talented newcomer Dominic Sessa.

More importantly still, the eerily empty school is dominated by Miss Lamb, the school’s cook and a woman of colour resoundingly played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph (like Giamatti, a Golden Globe winner for her performance). Like the menfolk she is marooned there over Christmas, and is suppressing her grief and agony for her son, a former pupil on a scholarship connected to her employment who has just been killed serving in Vietnam – precisely the military service that the white boys are getting prestigious college places to avoid.

Race and class and toxic masculinity are thus at stake here and it’s another salient reminder of what was important during the Vietnam war: unlike the Iraq and Afghanistan adventures of a later generation, the US had the draft and education was the centre of the unfair ways in which the draft could be circumvented. It was literally a matter of life and death.

Of course, audiences will be waiting for grumpy Mr Hunham and angry Angus, both lonely and family-deprived and images of each other at different life-stages, to achieve their intimacy breakthrough; perhaps it is no great surprise that they do, but this is managed with wit, style, forthright and ingenious narrative invention. Arguably Miss Lamb’s story takes second place to this central dynamic, but her performance is excellent and Payne and Hemingson create space for her character to breathe, particularly in the sequence in which she is reunited with her sister.

Has Payne punched harder than this in the past? Maybe. But the sympathy, richness and gentleness of this picture are still a marvel: a grownup drama for intelligent people. There is scope, however, for wondering why a story like this has to be placed in the past. Could it be updated to a school in 2024? I wonder, just as I wondered while watching Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, if the 70s setting gets the film-maker out of being bogged down in the 21st-century world of identity politics and the more clamorous demands of contemporary issues, while allowing everything to happen in a world paradoxically innocent of political and social guilt.

But what a unique talent Giamatti is; it’s a pleasure to see him play a movie lead, his first for a while, and his prominence in this really good film is a signal that the cinema could be moving back to a more approachable world of authentic drama and analogue talent.

• The Holdovers is released on 19 January in UK and Irish cinemas, and is screening in Australian cinemas now.