For years Alexander
Payne has been trying to posit himself in the film world as the new Hal Ashby or
Bob Rafelson in terms of crafting distinctly homegrown road movies as American
character studies, starting with his sleeper hit Election followed by
the Academy Award nominated Jack Nicholson starring About Schmidt. A couple years later the small-town American
auteur joined forces with Paul Giamatti in the critically acclaimed Sideways
before taking a bit of a hiatus for years until The Descendants and Nebraska
came along.
Payne was on track to
become one of the most wholly original auteurs of modern American cinema with
several acclaimed hits. And then came Downsizing
in 2017, a film which like Atom Egoyan’s Where the Truth Lies
before it seemed to undermine the filmmaker’s credibility in the court of
critical and commercial opinion. Though
Payne stayed active in film production, it would be six years before he would
sit back in the director’s chair again.
Thankfully that fall from grace hasn’t slowed Payne down that much,
reuniting the director with Paul Giamatti in ostensibly Payne’s very own riff
on The Paper Chase with the hard-nosed college teacher dramedy The
Holdovers. The 1971
period-set story of a largely unlikable college professor Paul Hunham at Barton
Academy who supervises students unable to return home from school for the
holidays, the strict schoolteacher potentially on a cranky power trip meets his
match in the form of rebellious smart mouthed student Angus Tully (newcomer
Dominic Sessa in his screen debut). Grieving
the loss of his father, Angus and the glass-eyed Hunham lock horns immediately
with the two testing each others’ limits.
From there however a unique bond forms between them and the school’s
head cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) still grieving over the recent loss
of her young son to the Vietnam War.
Much of the film’s
strength rests on the shoulders of Paul Giamatti as a John Houseman type of
curmudgeon who rules the classroom with an iron fist but secretly slacks around
himself on the side. Dominic Sessa in
his first screen role recalls the Alana Haim casting in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza in casting an
untrained actor for a key role. The one
with the heaviest lifting is undoubtedly Da’Vine Joy Randolph who steals more
than a few scenes away from both Giamatti and Sessa with a quietly powerful
performance simmering with anger and hurt despite her maternal attitude towards
Sessa’s plight.
--Andrew Kotwicki