Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A
Cinematography: A-
Editing: A

It would seem that director Alexander Payne and star Paul Giamatti are a reliably magical combination. I loved their last collaboration, 2004’s Sideways, and two decades later I love The Holdovers just as much—if not even more so.

I can’t remember the last time I saw a film so thoroughly heartwarming. There’s something about the script, by first-time feature writer David Hemingson, with its characters who are cynical and wounded, but we only get to watch them work through those challenges. Where other writers would give their characters a sudden, renewed hardship or mistake to overcome or get past at a prescribed point in the story, in The Holdovers you only continue growing more fond of them. There is nothing flashy about this movie, and yet its storytelling is deceptively unconventional.

Payne does like to give his movies odd little flourishes, as in this one, set in the year 1970, and given utterly 1970s-style production company logos at the start of the film, complete with visual graininess to make it look like a film that was actually shot fifty years ago. At first I thought this was a little unnecessarily cutesy, but Payne successfully plants you into the fully realized world of this movie.

Paul Giamatti is a peculiar movie star, a guy with a storied career, and an undeniable charm and screen presence that belies his longstanding frumpy look. Now at the age of 56, he’s perfectly cast as a longtime rural private school teacher with a lazy eye and a penchant for solitude. This is the kind of part we have seen a zillion times in movies, and Giamatti manages to make Paul Hunham utterly his own. Paul has a warmth to him that surfaces naturally, under the right circumstances.

In particular, the circumstances here involve him being roped into chaperoning the “holdovers” of the movie’s title: five kids who are unable, for various reasons, to go home for Christmas break and have to spend it at the otherwise abandoned school. One of these kids is Angus Tully, played by impressive newcomer Dominic Sessa. The school these kids attend has a lot of students from very rich families, and when one of the “holdover” kids gets invited home for a ski trip and invites all the other kids, Angus is the only one whose parents can’t be reached, leaving Mr. Hunham and Angus to themselves, alongside grieving school cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, currently more likely than anyone else in this film to be nominated for—and win—an Oscar).

It’s difficult to put into words how wonderful I found The Holdovers. It filled my heart. I tried to think of other descriptors that could work. There’s an element of sweetness, I suppose, but that’s not really what the movie is. Maybe “wholesome” is the right word. Yes, I think that’s it: many “feel-good” movies of the 21st century are self-consciously bawdy with a “wholesome” subtext that just rings false. The Holdovers is the kind of movie that is never bawdy although it can be slightly vulgar when it wants to be, and it gets its tone of wholesomeness exactly right. It brings to mind old family dramas like Terms of Endearment—except movies like that are what I would call “comic tearjerkers,” and The Holdovers is neither as comic (although it’s often funny) nor nearly as much of a tearjerker (although I did cry a little).

It would seem that Alexander Payne is in a class of his own. His movies are about the people who connect in spite of familial challenges of almost pointed specificity. These characters are expertly drawn, complete people. The best I can tell you is to watch The Holdovers and see for yourself. Maybe it won’t bowl you over, as it’s not designed to be. But it spoke to me at a deep level.

*An unlikely trio make for a cozy found family of wounded souls.*

Overall: A