The Return of Payne: The Holdovers

After a rewatch after too many years of Election, it occurred to me that I was very much overdue for doing the same with Citizen Ruth. Then I started ticking off other films helmed by Alexander Payne and I was reminded me of the embarrassment of riches in his filmography. Sideways, About Schmidt, and Nebraska are, without putting too fine a point on it, classics pure and simple. The Descendants and Downsizing are often viewed as lesser works (Downsizing, particularly, but I quite liked the The Descendants) and with his latest, Payne delivers a lapidarian cinematic work, intimate and layered, if not particularly deep.

It's a lovely small work, perfectly crafted and as with most of his films, it neither panders nor manipulates. Paul Giamatti rejoins Payne for the first time since Sideways and as usual, delivers a remarkable performance. His characterizations just feel "complete"; these are fully realized people. Some might argue that it's all in the writing, but it plainly isn't. Case in pont: Paul Hunhuam in the present work. 

As written, he is, at minimum, a curmudgeon. He's a teacher at a New England prep school for boys in 1970 and is a dinosaur of antiquated, rigid approaches to education. The students hate him, his colleagues detest him and it seems the only person who tolerates him is Mary Lamb, the school's kitchen manager, whose son attended Barton and is played with the utmost sensitivity and depth by Da'vine Joy Randolph  Randolph has been quietly killing it in series work for over a decade (most recently in Only Murders in the Building) and she walked away with every scene she was in in The Lost City. 

Hunham, on the page and if we had only to go by his dialog, is so limited and such a type that in lesser hands, he'd read as a caricature. He comes alive on screen thanks to Giamatti's sense of a lived experience and over the course of the film, we learn more and more about his life of, if not abject failure, then stunted development. 

At different turns, I almost heard.a voice in the back of my head say "he's not a bad sort, just out of touch and insensitive...you know, he doesn't know how to read a room". But is this that makes him so compelling. He does attempt to do the right thing, he does have his heart in the right place, but all the right stuff comes at the wrong times and yes, he can be frustratingly tone deaf. A scene at a bowling alley in Boston sums it up to a tee as he attempts to make small talk with a couple of regular guys at the bar by referencing ancient Rome. The look on their faces says it all.

Giamattic carries himself hunched over in discomfort with life itself. "I find the world a bitter and complicated place. And it seems to feel the same way about me", he says to Angus, his charge, the last remaining "holdover" from a group of kids whose parents either couldn't afford to send them home for Christmas (or frankly, as in Angus's case, were too self-involved to extend the invitation). By the point in the film when he shares this with his charge, we've come to see several shades to Paul's personality. 

I hope that I don't make it sound like the script's dialog is insufficient or wanting, because it's not. David Hemingson's script is precise, tight, and a study in how most of us live lives of quiet desperation It's also a study in how that turning in on ourselves can render us dull, thick, and insensitive and although this is going to make it sound ham-handed (and the script is anything but), how it is only through opening our eyes and selves up to others' and their unique suffering and trials, that we can come to terms wiht our own. Man, I just bled the humor out of a much wittier and wiser film with that description.

The character bases are covered handily in the first third of the movie. The relentless dicking around of the students, particularly between Angus (easily the smartest kid in the school) and Koontz (easily the dumbest) but extending toward interactions across the spectrum of hazing and bullying as one could only find among the halls of an institution dedicated to the education of the scions of the moneyed elite. Paul Hunham's resentment and disdain for the students is not without foundation, but it comes at a cost when he refuses to pass one of the idiots simply because the kid is the son of a major donor. Hunham doesn't respond well to privilege. 

Hunham is resigned to his fate when he learns that despite it not being his turn to stay at the school over the holiday break (another instructor transparently fabricated that his wife had lupus and had to be with her); however, he is adamant that his charges - Angus, the previously mentioned Kountze, Jason Smith, and two younger underclassmen (-boys?) - will continue to study and prep for a make-up exam after the break. 

The dynamic remains one of the oppressed and oppressor, and Hunham just doubles down on his oppression. Jason puts a call out to his father who sends a helicopter to take him, Kountze, and the other two kids off to a skiing vacation. Angus has been pretty much abandoned so his mother and step-father can have a honeymoon which takes precedence over a family Christmas. In other words, he's very much stuck with Hunham, and conversely, Hunham is stuck with Angus. Mary endures both. That's kind of unfair; whe seems genuinely fond of both, certainly not above sharing a snort with Paul and going to bat for Angus.

Once the supporting cast has cleared out, the film gets down to business, fleshing out back stories and filling out the characters. We have a pretty good idea of Angus's plight; a smart kid whose arrogance is likely a defense against, well, the on-going annoyance of adolescence but most importantly, of utter parental neglect. We also learn that Mary's son Curtis had been a student at Barton, graduated and was called up by the draft and died in Vietnam before he turned twenty. Paul's story finds it reveal near the third act where we learn that he never graduated Harvard, his roommate stole his work and plagiarized and then turned around and accused Paul of plagiarizing him. 

That comes after we've seen just how buffeted by life our trio is and has been. Over the course of a couple of weeks, Paul opens up a bit more and shows a richer, more human(e) side and Angus has one more cat he needs to let out of the bag. While it's true he'd not seen his father in many years, it was simply assumed that he had died. When they are in Boston on a "field trip" and Angus sneaks out on Paul to take a cab, Paul is obviously upset since Angus is his responsibility. Once Angus explains he wants to see his father, Paul understands and joins him. 

Well, the old man isn't dead; he is, however, very much mentally unwell and in a facility suffering from a schizophrenic-like disorder. Angus wonders if his dad was even aware of who he is. We find out later that, yes, he was. 

Mary, meanwhile, returned with Paul and Angus to Boston to visit her sister and family and this provides a loving warmth that adds to the thaw in the personalities we've watched over the course of the film. 

None of this is maudlin or mawkish. Hemingson's script is too smart for that and Payne wouldn't have it, anyway. Each story beat lands and with a lyrical as opposed to heavy, beat. Here is as good as any place to stump for Dominic Sessa as Angus in the best debut of the year. Sessa auditioned with other students at the Deerfield Academy in Deerfield, Massachusetts and got one of the best first roles any actor could ask for. He's now at Carnegie Mellon and something tells me we'll be seeing a lot more of him in years to come. 

His Angus Tully is as layered as Giamatti's Paul and how he's able to share the screen with Giamattis is revelatory. We can assume that Giamatti is a generous scene partner, but it takes more than that to render a character as fully as Sessa does here. If acting is mostly reacting, it's to Sessa's credit that he does so expertly in his work with others, including and especially with Giamatti, but also with Randolph and others. 

Angus has a formidable presence of that crummy mix some of us had as kids of arrogance masking insecurity and barbed words as expressions of utter defensiveness. But then, he could show remarkable acts of kindness, particularly in comforting the younger kids subjected to Kountze's bullying and one of whom had a nightmare and wet the bed. Additionally, he's spot and fully attentive in his scenes with Paul; there isn't a phony moment to be found.

The film is replete with small character moments and a Breakfast Club kind of sequence when Paul is chasing Angus through the school threatening to have him suspended. There are also the moments when each covers for the other, as when Angus's shoulder is dislocated (from the earlier chase) and latterly, when they bump into Paul's former roommate in Boston. 

As these kinds of things go, though, we can guess that the new year is going to bring changes. Paul is summoned to the headmaster's office where he meets Angus's mother and stepfather, who reprimand Paul for taking him to see Angus's father. Angus knows that he's not to see his father because of the emotional instability and upset it will cause his dad. After Angus left, there was some episode at the institution to such a degree that his father will have to be moved to another one. 

Paul explains that it was his decision to take Angus to see Mr. Tully and that he, Paul, insisted on it (otherwise, Angus would be looking at being pulled out of Barton and sent to military school). This results in Paul getting fired from his post but saving Angus from a rotten fate.

Much has been made of the film's look; how Payne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld took pains (that's not intentional) to render the film to look very much of its time. Normally, it's a kind of affectation or worse, a stunt that cheapens the film (unless intended to satirize the genre - or pay homage - as in Tarantino and Rodriguez's Grindhouse). In this case, it's very much part of the narrative, locating the film in a time of fraught change. The Vietnam War is raging and ending lives of children only a little older than Paul, the Civil Rights Act had only been introduced a few years older, and there were massive cultural fissures between the younger generation and their parents. 

Likewise, what's happening in the outside world finds a mirror among our three protagonists with, perhaps, more hopeful resolutions in sight. We have the generation gap between Paul and Angus, of course, but also, the terrible uncertainties that fill Angus's life and the numbness he seems to feel underneath it all when not angry or acting out his arrogance. Paul, like his contemporaries, remains baffled and frustrated by examples of a generation - particularly, the most entitled and wealthy examples of this generation - squandering their promise repeatedly in apathy and lacking in noblesse oblige, hardly - in Paul's eyes - capable of understanding the written word, let alone having any grasp of history.

Mary, most importantly, provides the most important counterpoint to the other two's narrative; hers is the female, Black, and marginalized experience that neither Paul nor Angus can ever possibly grasp, but whose wisdom is deeper and more humanistic than even Paul's classical authors. To be fair, Paul defends Mary against the privileged holdovers earlier in the picture, but it's made plain that it wouldn't matter if he does or doesn't. Mary's seen it all and it's unlikely that any of the little snots are capable of ruffling her feathers.

You could look to the films of Hal Ashby for influences, but David Hemingson wrote a short piece for Time Magazine explaining the influences on his script, who he pulled from his past to draw these wonderful characters.

That The Holdovers isn't as deep as some might wish, it's profound enough with a gentle humanity and a kind of acerbic grace as needed. Payne's back and it's nice to have him.