Talk of the town
Award-winner Paul Giamatti is at the peak of his oratory powers in this simple story
There are no special effects to be seen in The Holdovers. This is as analog a movie as ever you will encounter in the digital age. The only location of note is an empty school at the height of the Christmas holidays. The number of people inside that abandoned educational facility is often just three, sometimes less.
A majority of the scenes contain nothing more than conversations. But oh, what conversations they are. For The Holdovers is, among other things, a love letter to how people used to speak in movies: always to each other, never at each other.
You will start this journey as a distant eavesdropper, and end it right up close to the characters, hanging on their every word.
What truly elevates The Holdovers to the highest rank of recent releases is its lead actor, Paul Giamatti.
There may be no better-spoken performer in the game right now than this guy, an unpretentiously assured orator whose way with words can lift listeners to dizzying heights, or cut them right down to size. All in the space of one line of dialogue.
Giamatti is truly at the peak of his oratory powers in The Holdovers, playing Paul Hunham, a goodnaturedly gruff academic forced by his exasperated employers to take a holiday job the rest of his peers have avoided like the plague.
Paul teaches history at an elite boarding school in the middle of nowhere. Whenever Christmas comes around, one teacher must spend a week looking after those students unable to return home for the holiday season.
For this particular season – December of 1970, to be precise – Mr Hunham has just the one charge in his care. Angus (Dominic Sessa) is your archetypal snooty rich kid, albeit in a temporary state of shock that his parents don’t want him tagging along on their tropical island getaway.
Needless to say, Paul and Angus do not get along at all. Until they somehow do. Left with no choice but to open up and speak their minds, the pair form an unlikely alliance that will eventually break down each of their unappealing veneers.
The catalyst for this unforeseen, yet welcome, change is the only other resident for the week leading up to the New Year: the school’s cafeteria manager, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph who, along with Giamatti, just won a Golden Globe for this film). A straight-talking, no-bulldust type, Mary has no time for polite niceties. She calls it as she sees it. And indeed, feels it: in the year just gone, her son, a former student at the school, died in the Vietnam War.
Such a familiar set-up – which unapologetically moves towards familiar feel-good terrain – could come across as cravenly cliched and even sickly sweet in the wrong hands.
Not so here. With Giamatti striding forward with complete confidence – and relative rookies Sessa (a firsttime actor) and Randolph (in the first decent role of her career) keeping pace every step of the way – The Holdovers tells its simple story with deep feeling, great humour and refreshing authenticity. The Holdovers is in cinemas now