Hold On?

Director Alexander Payne has been in the Oscar hunt a few times before, and the buzz is he will be again with his latest, The Holdovers.

In 1970, a boarding school is breaking for the holidays and all the students are leaving. One curmudgeonly teacher has the task of watching the handful of students who have nowhere to go. One of these students in particular is struggling to come to terms with a secret, unshared trauma. Meanwhile, the cafeteria administrator is also staying on campus to be closer to the spirit of her son, who was recently killed in the Vietnam War. These three broken people might have the pieces to help put each other back together.

The Holdovers is notable for Payne working again with Paul Giamatti, star of one of his first critical darlings, Sideways. But the similarities are really only at the surface level. Sideways isn't terribly interested in exploring why the main character is the way he is, but is more fixed on how he's messing up his present. The Holdovers is much more about history -- and isn't subtle about the fact: Giamatti's character is a teacher of ancient history.

I found the movie to be rather slow-paced. And it really keeps its three primary characters siloed from one another for a long time. I suppose that makes sense; if bringing these three closer together is going to help all of them heal, then you have to take that process slowly or you don't have a movie. And yet, you spend a lot of this movie feeling like you know at least generally where it's going, and wondering why it's taking so long to get there.

There are some weird diversions along the way that the movie doesn't really pay off. Another faculty member at the school, played by The Good Wife/Fight's Carrie Preston, is dangled in front of the audience for a while as potentially important, but really just fizzles out at the end of Act Two. A janitor character saunters in at a point where we thought we'd met every character still at the college for the holidays, yet not to play much of a role in the story.

But that doesn't mean I disliked the movie. That's because it had two really strong points in its favor. One is the final 30-to-45 minutes, where things finally pull together. It turns out that the movie does have a few surprises in store: revelations about each of the characters that truly reframes what you've seen so far. The journeys for each of them really entwine in a satisfying way as this bittersweet tale leans into the sweet.

The other huge strength is in the performances. It's probably no surprise to anyone that Paul Giamatti is fun as this crusty and initially unlikeable character. It's probably only slightly less surprising that, in a movie that turns on casting a strong young actor, they've conducted a deep enough search to discover Dominic Sessa, who plays student Angus Tully. But stealing the movie from both of them is Da'Vine Joy Randolph as cafeteria administrator Mary. She's hardly new to acting; she has a Tony nomination under her belt. But I don't believe I've seen her on screen before, and I'm certain this role will change that -- she deserves to find many more roles from this.

I do hope there's a movie in the Best Picture hunt this year that I like more enthusiastically than this one. But I was ultimately satisfied with how this one comes together, and I wonder if Christmas has found a new melancholy classic. I give The Holdovers a B.