Though he’s made a number of movies I don’t like much—and I couldn’t get past the first episode of Billions—Paul Giamatti for me is maybe the most pleasurable American film actor to watch. He never resorts to realism, and, in fact, exudes a kind of contagious joy in his creation of a character. He obviously had a ball with Paul Hunham, the curmudgeonly, generally reviled (by both students and administration) history teacher at Barton Academy, an elite New England male boarding school where he’s been on the faculty forever. When he lights into a class of “rich and dumb” (“a popular combination around here”) students who bridle at his assignments he savors every stinging insult as if he’d been saving it up for just such an occasion. He sprinkles his observations with pointed anecdotes from classical history and adheres to the philosophy of Marcus Aurelius because he’s an unabashed atheist. Hunham doesn’t mind being pegged as an intellectual snob because he has nothing else to show for his life, so of course everyone hates him, which is how he ended up being assigned the task of babysitting the “holdovers”—those students who, for one reason or another, have no place to go during Christmas break. It’s a thankless job and since Hunham actually lives on campus full-time it’s not as if he’d be put out, but, of course, that’s how he feels. In the end, he’s stuck with only one student to watch, Angus (Dominic Sessa), whose newly remarried mother is on her honeymoon. 

Since the story takes place in the early 70s, there are no cell phones, internet, or much in the way of visual entertainment to take up time, and Angus, we’ve already come to understand, is an angry young man whose future prospects are not assured despite his mother’s money since he possesses a temperament that could easily sabotage those prospects. He’s already been thrown out of three other boarding schools. Naturally, he and Hunham rub each other the wrong way on a nearly constant basis, with the school cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), their only other companion, acting as reluctant mediator. As it stands, David Hemingson’s script is extremely well structured and predictable, and Alexander Payne, the director who essentially made Giamatti a leading man with Sideways, tries too hard to fashion a work that looks as if it were made in the 70s, from the shock zooms to the fonts of the title and ending credits, not to mention the wintry hues of the film stock. It also has the leisurely pace of those New Hollywood films that allow the characters to reveal their most intimate details over time, and all three leads take full advantage of it to deliver extremely well-defined characters. The pleasures just multiply as the story progresses.

Eventually, the traumas and mistakes that bolster each character’s outward bitterness are disclosed with unnerving assurance, and while the plot resolves itself accordingly, the characters feel less credible and, for that matter, likable, though we’re now meant to see them as more fully human. Hunham’s story is particularly moving, and his means of owning up to it with a late act of moral courage is satisfying without being particularly momentous, which, in a way, is the most surprising thing about The Holdovers. Losers will always be losers to those who look down on them, which will never include audiences for this kind of drama. I just wanted the funny stuff to continue indefinitely. 

Opens June 21 in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Kino Cinema Shinjuku (03-5315-0978), Toho Cinemas Nihonbashi (050-6868-5060), Bunkamura Le Cinema Shibuya Miyashita (050-6875-5280).

The Holdovers home page in Japanese

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