History teacher Paul Hunham initially intended to spend his Christmas alone again, but he is stuck taking care of five teenage students who were abandoned at the boarding school Barton Academy. When four of them are picked up by relatives or friends, Paul is left alone with student Agnus, whose mother doesn't want him for the holidays as to spend it with her new rich husband. With the persuasion of school cook Mary, Paul and Agnus take a car trip to Boston to be among people for Christmas. Mary stays with her relatives, while Agnus goes to a mental asylum to see his absent father, who is institutionalized there. Returning back to the boarding school, Agnus' mother is angry because his visit caused his father to become violent, but Paul takes the blame for the decision of visit, and is thus fired. However, he gains respect from Agnus.
"The Holdovers" are an anti-Christmas movie. The holidays are sometimes used in cinema as means to show those characters who have someone to be with during this time, and those who don't have anyone—and since the director Alexander Payne has a very bitter, cynical and pessimistic worldview, he naturally shows the latter less fortunate characters which are avoided in your run-of-the-mill mainstream Christmas movies. Written by David Hemingson ("Pepper Ann"), "The Holdovers" starts off as a very depressing experience where the viewers think history teacher Paul (excellent Paul Giamatti) and student Agnus will be left alone and "stuck" in the empty boarding school for the entire Christmas, but after 40 minutes it luckily "twitches" itself from this grey frequency and becomes more dynamic when the two go out on a car trip to Boston and suddenly start to bond—by the end, it becomes clear that Paul and Agnus are the same person, just in different age.
Like all of Payne's movies, this one also has no real story, but is instead a 'slice-of-life' character study, composed out of small vignettes and episodes, but all of which unite in the end and reach a point. Paul is another of Payne's outsiders and misanthropes, but a one who accepts that he is alone because he was born ugly—in a conversation with cook Mary, he explains it with determinism: "This is not exactly a face forged for romance". The film also has several great, witty dialogues ("I can't fail this class". - "Oh, don't sell yourself short, Mr. Kountze, I truly believe that you can."; in the museum, Paul goes: "There's nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion... Before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past"; "Do you think I want to be babysitting you? Oh, no, no, I was praying to the god I don't even believe in that your mother would pick up the phone or your father would arrive in a helicopter or a submarine or a flying saucer to take you"). Payne knows better than to craft a typical character arc or redemption lore in the last third, since life doesn't always have big events that change characters fully, yet he granted a rather elegant heart-warming finale regarding Paul's relation with Agnus, congruent to the Christmas spirit. Despite some omission and a rather meandering storyline, "The Holdovers" may be Payne's best film.
Grade:+++
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