Nostalgia has consumed pop culture but The Holdovers does something special

Nostalgia is everywhere in pop culture, forced or organic, jolting or comforting: the rewatch of Girls, the reunion of NSYNC, the resurgence of Kate Bush via 80s-baiting Stranger Things, the new Fatal Attraction, a refreshed Wednesday Addams, another Sex and the City. It can be a trap. It is, as Vulture’s Craig Jenkins put it in a review of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour movie, the flashiest and most lucrative nostalgia enterprise of the moment, a “retirement community, the place the mind goes when it’s tired of going places”. The retirement community is a bankable one, our streaming economy flush with reboots and revisions harkening to a fondness for the past.

Related: The Holdovers review – Alexander Payne and Paul Giamatti reunite for charming comedy

It’s perhaps this omnipresence that gives nostalgia a bad rep. Reaching for the past – it’s easy, indulgent, unoriginal. Another retread, another rose-colored gesture to something past. Even at its best, trading on the human affinity for the familiar has the stink of cheapness, so often is nostalgia deployed to cover for a lack of anything else to say.

Such are the critiques waiting at the ready for The Holdovers, writer/director Alexander Payne’s entry into the holiday canon (yet inexplicably released in the US at the end of October), a bittersweet comedy-drama about three hard-shelled misfits – curmudgeonly professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), misanthropic teen Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) and grieving mother Mary Lamb (a superb Da’Vine Joy Randolph) – stranded together for the holidays at a New England prep school in 1970.

Payne, who won an Oscar for 2004’s Sideways, another concoction of barbs and heart, sets himself a double nostalgia mission: a film aiming for a realist re-creation of 1970 that is also expressly trying to look like it had been made in the 70s. From the period signifiers – vintage MPAA and distributor logos, digitally added scratch marks, even a portentous baritone narrator for the trailer – to the coloring, to the use of fade-outs and zoom lens, The Holdovers could convincingly derive from several decades ago. It looks different from most everything else made today, even period pieces, trading on an ingrown assumption of digital natives that if something looks old, it’s of higher quality. Age, even a decade’s worth let alone the illusion of half a century, takes on an air of gravitas.

It’s an illusion that could be gimmicky, if The Holdovers weren’t so beautifully calibrated, finely acted and attuned as much to the loneliness of special occasions as the evergreen human potential for connection. If it weren’t, for lack of a better term, so well made. The line brought up by more than one critic was “they don’t make them like they used to”, which is both true and not. For sure, there are still well-acted, auteur-driven, meticulously crafted character dramas made today. For sure, The Holdovers harkens back to an era when original material wasn’t as scarce, with less “content” to dump cheaply into a streaming slush pile.

Successful nostalgia is not look or makeup but feel, and The Holdovers has that in spades, embodying a period rather than milking it. I didn’t live during the 70s; my impression of it comes from movies, film, photos, a stack of Life magazines from the Vietnam era that my grandmother kept for decades – all imperfect, limited snapshots, all sans direct lived experience. More than once, I found myself thinking of her house while watching The Holdovers – she and Paul shared a certain braided rug, affection for spirits and biting New England winters. Nostalgia, done well, is a potion that whisks you elsewhere.

But a heady focus on character keeps The Holdovers from descending into just old-seeming, misty-eyed vibes. These three remainders at musty Barton Academy, proud and prickly as they are, look backwards too. Paul Hunham is himself a creature of the past, a tragicomic obsessive of ancient civilizations poised to denigrate students as “hormonal vulgarians” with a dirge for the Peloponnesian war. (He’d be the first to tell you that the term “nostalgia” derives from the ancient Greek words nostos (home) and algos (pain), and that it particularly afflicted Odysseus.) Angus, an old soul at a rebellious 17, is already reckoning with a broken, icy family. Mary, mourning the loss of her only son, Curtis, in Vietnam, barrels through her first holidays alone. In one of many standout scenes, alcohol, an Artie Shaw record and the alienating conviviality of a holiday party move her to tears; in Randolph’s hands, Mary’s by-the-numbers grief and steeliness are an intangible, sparklingly alive tangle.

The Holdovers occasionally wears its heart too on its sleeve – one of Paul’s many irascible yet heartfelt monologues vaunts the practice of history as an ode to humanity, its pettiness as much as its grandeur; to him and to this film, looking backwards to find what unites us is a heroic if somewhat lonely mission. (For what it’s worth, I tend to agree.) Payne’s wistful vision wards off the bogeyman of cheapness by drawing us closer to Paul, Angus, Mary – the characters’ individual aches, their soft selves, their yearning for someone or something else, the weird, aimless longing that hangs around the holidays, even for the most lovingly surrounded. As with anything nostalgia-oriented, The Holdovers either casts a spell on you or it doesn’t. But at least it’s forging a different path with the evergreen desire for what was.

• The Holdovers is now out in US cinemas and in the UK on 19 January