Stuck in the 70s

Sour but also weirdly cloying, full of sympathy for the working man yet also strangely pretentious, Alexander Payne’s ‘The Holdovers’ is a nostalgic tribute to naturalistic 1970s cinema that somehow completely misses the point of those movies. It takes the anti-establishment attitude of ‘The Graduate’ and the grittiness of movies like ‘Scarecrow’ and grafts them onto a “learning to love teacher” plot that would make ‘Dead Poets Society’ blush.

THE HOLDOVERS ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Alexander Payne
Written by: David Hemingson
Starring: Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da’Vine Joy Randolph
Running time: 133 mins

Set at an elite but somehow extremely grimy all-male boarding school in 1970, the year I was born(!), The Holdovers purports to have something to say about how the elite skate by on their privileged legacies while regular people have to go off to war. It’s the latest in a line of recent movies taking the courageous moral stance against U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the definition of a safe political position at this point. Paul Giamatti is in nearly every frame as an utterly disgusting and pompous teacher of classics and the ancient world, who fails students on the reg and quotes Cicero in Latin to his colleagues who he believes are his lessers.

When Giamatti flunks out the son of a U.S. Senator, his dean punishes him by making him the “warden” of the few unfortunate boys who have nowhere else to go for Christmas break. After a brief interlude where it looks like an interesting Lord of the Flies scenario might break out, the movie quickly retreats into a buddy comedy between Giamatti and the one boy who remains, a gawky miscreant named Angus Tully, played by Dominic Sessa and his bobbing Adam’s Apple.

Sessa, who in real life is a student at Carnegie Mellon University, is the moral center of the movie. He gives an appealing, vulnerable performance, even when dealing with clichéd material that seems lifted more from an Afterschool Special than the type of Hal Ashby movie that Payne wants to emulate. Giamatti, on the other hand, is a buckshot load of mannerisms, with his haughty delivery and his weird loopy eyes. At one point Tully tells him “you smell like fish,” and Giamatti reveals that it’s true, he has a glandular disorder that makes him smell like fish. Even though The Holdovers is not in Smell-O-Vision, once the script invokes “smell like fish”, you cannot unsmell it, and I found myself praying for the exit and a mental odor reset.

A post-Christmas field trip to Boston leads to some tender Act Three character revelations that the previous 90 minutes of runtime don’t really earn. While they “humanize” Giamatti’s character, a lot of it feels forced and pseudo, heartwarming without being particularly interesting. And that kind of sums up The Holdovers in general, which has nothing particularly relevant to say about the world and offers nothing but nostalgia for a more “real” era of filmmaking. It is an overlong movie desperately in search of the Oscar nominations it will most likely receive.

I do hope one of those nominations go to Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who plays the film’s third major character, the boarding school’s morbidly obese chain-smoking African-American head cook, Mary, who lost her only son to the Vietnam War and her son’s father to a construction accident. Randolph is alternately dignified and drunk, a strong moral center but also a blubbering mess at a Christmas party. She is terrific in the role, and nothing she does seems forced or phony. She’s also, not coincidentally, the kind of character that was hard to find in a 1970s movie, which, for all their strengths, did not feature a lot of Black characters with depth. Nothing particularly dramatic happens to Mary during the course of the film; all her life’s drama is already in the past. She just holds her ground and makes no waves. As she says, “I like having a job.”

We also leave Tully on a note of cloistered boarding-school hope, but I found myself thinking “so what”? We all know that the 1970s offered nothing very good unless you were Reggie Jackson or, like, a member of The Eagles. Unlike, say, in Curtis Sittenfeld’s novel ‘Prep,’ the best depiction of boarding school life since ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ (if not ever), you didn’t really get the sense of the day-to-day on campus. And that’s because it chooses to throw its lot in with Giamatti, who, in the end, is such a loser that his portrayal almost feels exploitative. Movies about 1970s losers like Eddie Coyle were effective because they exposed societal rot in real time. This one feels more like a ride so we can remember a time when people smoked in restaurants.

As I walked out of the theater, I gave a sniff to make sure that I didn’t smell like fish myself. Mercifully, Giamatti hadn’t rubbed off on me. I didn’t even smell like smoke, because it’s not the 1970s anymore.