‘The Holdovers’ Gives Paul Giamatti His Best Movie Role Since ‘Sideways’

God bless you, Paul Giamatti.

There are actors who are unafraid to look foolish or petty in roles, who lean in to being unlikable onscreen when the mood (and the awards season) strikes, who might slum it by occasionally sporting an unflattering haircut or [shudder] reading glasses. And then there is 55-year-old Giamatti, who seems to effortlessly slip into maximum sad-sack mode at a moment’s notice. He’s an artist who can make a symphony out of playing 12 different notes of pathetic, and make every dissonant suite sound natural. This is a performer who understands that comedy is not pretty, pathos isn’t kind to those on the receiving end, and that humanity is anything but perfect. It’s in those amplified imperfections, in fact, that Giamatti usually finds what makes us Homo sapiens so doomed and so deserving of love. These are all compliments, by the way. Nobody else could have portrayed Harvey Pekar so beautifully. Or, for that matter, properly articulated the existential crisis of a teenage boy’s enraged bowel movement.

The Holdovers reunites Giamatti with Sideways director Alexander Payne, and you wonder if part of the writer-director’s pitch was, “Hey, remember that lonely oenophile who drank from a wine spit bucket? Would you like to play someone even more challengingly cantankerous?” A throwback drama not only set in the 1970s but replicating the era’s filmmaking style to often thrilling, sometimes distracting ends — how we’ve missed you, vintage blue MPAA-rating screen — this biting, bittersweet movie gathers together three lost souls stuck in a tony Northeastern prep school during Christmas break.

One soul is a little more hopelessly lost than the others, however, and that’s the role assigned to the Oscar nominee. The first time we see Paul Hunham, he’s hunched over his office desk, grading papers; the first word we hear out of his mouth is a half-muttered, half laughingly sneered “Philistines!” This professor of ancient civilizations at the fictional Barton Academy is single, wall-eyed, smells bad thanks to a medical condition, and is disliked by fellow faculty members and students alike. He spends his evenings marinating in whiskey and his days trying to penetrate the skulls of the young, aristocratic and entitled who attend this prestigious all-boys school. Not that they appreciate what genius insights he has to offer, he’ll tell you, or even bother to crack textbooks, the cretins! “I can’t fail this class!” one pupil whines, upon receiving an F on a quiz. “Oh, don’t sell yourself short, young Mr. Kountze,” Hunham replies. “I believe that you most certainly can.”

It’s because this anti-Mr. Chips holds these young, impressionable minds to such a high standard that the professor is now being punished. Hunham has flunked the wrong dumb rich brat, hence he’s the one pulling babysitting duties for the “holdovers.” These are the kids who won’t be going home for the holidays, and thus are forced to stay on campus. Chief among these academic orphans is Angus Tully (newcomer Dominic Sessa), one of the smarter students killing time before vacation in Hunham’s class. He was set to go to St. Kitts when his mom informed him that he’d be staying behind, along with the others. Once school lets out, Hunham, Tully, the school’s resident cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and the rest of the wards settle in for a long winter’s imprisonment.

Then a twist of fate leaves Tully alone with the two adults, and The Holdovers essentially turns into a three-hander, as our unholy trinity take turns filling in some backstory blanks. There are early shenanigan-ish set pieces and smart-aleck showdowns and a lot of sharp retorts among the twentysomething cast members, as the film purposefully misleads you into thinking that this is a nostalgic look back at those lazy, hazy school days. Boys will be boys (malicious, horny, venal, carefully masking their vulnerabilities with cruelty, yet still bruising easier than a basketful of overripe peaches). Authority figures will be pompous and petty tyrants. A kind Black character will teach white characters many, many things about the world. Eyes will be opened, etc.

But like most of Payne’s back catalog, expectations become thwarted, talk becomes anything but cheap — instead, it becomes the movie’s main currency — and the focus will narrow to connections over differences. Working with TV veteran David Hemingson’s screenplay, the filmmaker takes a handful of details that might seem peripheral to the scenario, and traits that may seem secondary to this unholy trinity, then lets those elements dictate where things go. We find out that Hunham has a long history of humiliation both within and outside of Barton, as well as some qualities you’d almost be tempted to call redeeming. (Almost.) Tully keeps mentioning Boston, which is just a short drive from the school, and seems hellbent on getting there beyond having the cabin-fever blues. Early on, we learn that Mary’s son was a former Barton student who lost his life in Vietnam; soon, we get to see how that loss has affected her, and the marks that unending grief has left in its wake.

It becomes more of an actor’s showcase, in other words, which has always been one of Payne’s strengths — he’s an old-school director of performers, with a penchant for conjuring memories of several old schools in particular. Even if you ignore the meticulous Me Decade production design, you can’t watch The Holdovers and not think of the New Hollywood Seventies, when difficult stories about difficult people played on every other American screen. But it’s just as much a madeleine designed to make you remember the Nineties, when Payne first started to make a name for himself in independent movies and such extended character studies could faithfully find larger receptive audiences. The weathering of sea changes hasn’t changed what he does, in satisfying and, yes, sometimes extremely predictable ways — if you guessed that a road trip would somehow come into play, your hunch will definitely pay off. Yet after the wobbly high-concept satire of 2017’s Downsizing, this return to more grounded territory makes a case for his particular brand of spiky, sympathetic, unshakably humane dramedy still needing to be in the mix. His voice has been missed.

But back to the actors, who actually make that voice feel vital. Sessa may be the most inexperienced of the three, but he has an appealing rawness about him that feels suited to Angus; this is a kid who’s learned that life doesn’t hand you everything on a silver platter, even if you’re used to eating on them. There’s something unfinished about this young man, which this first-timer gloms onto in a way that feels organic. We’ve become used to Randolph stealing scenes and saving projects — her High Fidelity turn alone makes her a next-gen supporting-actor national treasure — but she’s called on to do a lot of heavy lifting with a character who isn’t as fully developed as those of her screen partners. And lift up Mary she does, in ways that are both very subtle (I love the way she just glides her finger over the patch on her son’s military jacket in her closet) and substantial. It’s not just the weary looks when Barton kids say casually racist, classist comments or the way she gently commiserates with Hunham over their shared break-time burden. It’s how Randolph gives you glimpses into this woman’s inner life in a way that feels like it goes beyond what’s on the page. You feel like you’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg with what she can do.

Yet The Holdovers knows that its ace in the hole is Giamatti, and his willingness to let his loser flag fly. There are times when several familiar Giamatti-isms — the 0-to-11 volume increase, the inchoate rage, the how-dare-you double take, the sped-up chuckle laced with feelings of superiority — are put to extremely good use here. No rough edges are sanded down, and even when you begin to understand that the teacher’s barbed eloquence and know-it-all attitude hide a reservoir of pain, you still find yourself considering how quickly you’d change seats if sat next to this man on a train. But you’re compelled to recognize how hard Hunham’s goodness is struggling against the comfort of being a misanthrope for all seasons. It’s a sweet spot for the star, one that Payne knows how to tailor a story around, and the film might not cut as deep without him. Whether you feel the crossroads we leave the character at the end is earned or not is a mileage-may-vary proposition. What you do walk away from this cracked Christmas-miracle tale with is an admiration for what Giamatti can do with such flawed people stuck in self-perpetuating ruts — and how richer we are for having him and Payne give such lost souls such a generous spotlight to grow, even if it’s a victory measured in millimeters.

From Rolling Stone US.