Alexander Payne’s delicately modulated crowd-pleaser The Holdovers is as impressive for what it does do as it is for what it doesn’t. The story of a man, woman and teen forced to spend Christmas together could have been soaked in syrup, a pat chosen family narrative where everyone easily sinks into their conveniently marked role, leaving the holidays as a dysfunctional but loving new unit.
And while there are lessons learned and bridges built, there’s also a refusal to succumb to the saccharine this setup suggests, a clever weave away from expected formula, trope-adjacent characters elevated to real, living, difficult people. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, Payne balked at those using the word “cosy” to describe it, saying that the word “nauseates” him and instead telling IndieWire that part of the inspiration for the festive setting is that a “very large percentage of suicides happen” between Christmas and new years.
His three characters don’t openly entertain the idea of killing themselves (the film is about grim topics but never itself grim) - they’re all just at the mercy of an emotional struggle and Payne, along with screenwriter David Hemingson, understands that this particular time of year makes that struggle seem all the more impossible to get through. Roaming around an otherwise empty prep school, as if the rest of the world had forgotten about them, a teacher and a student both dealing with depression and a cook coping with the death of her son must find a way through to the other side. If they can just make it to the new year then maybe they might actually make it.
Like some of the year’s other great films, such as Past Lives and All of Us Strangers, The Holdovers is elegant and cinematic while also remaining rooted in the messy and uncomfortable reality of human behaviour, a combination we sadly just don’t get to see as often as we should anymore. It’s both set in the 70s and styled as if it were actually made in that period, at a time when those two qualities would more frequently come hand-in-hand, anchored by three lived-in performances that could have also existed back then. Paul Giamatti’s hard-edged curmudgeon, newcomer Dominic Sessa’s defiant rule-breaker and Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s grieving mother are so well-drawn and realised that we can see their lives before and after, characters that go on living whether we’re there to see them or not.
We’re not left with the knowledge that they’ll forever be in each other’s lives but we’re shown the importance of being in someone’s life at just the right time, needed then but perhaps never needed again. It’s not cosy in the traditional sense (Payne, please don’t hurt me) but it does leave us with a feeling of warmth, the kind that lingers for even longer when we know how cold it can get.
