‘I had a lot of experience with people like this’
◆ With The Holdovers finally landing in UK cinemas, Rachael Davis sits down with Golden Globe-winning stars Paul Giamatti and Da’vine Joy Randolph
It may no longer be Christmas time, but the air’s icy chill and the dark nights could still do with an injection of warmth and tenderness.
So, while the story in Alexander Payne’s charming 70s-set dramedy The Holdovers might take place over the Christmas period, its gentle, redemptive tale told amid the snowy New England winter remains just perfect for Britain's cold, dark January days.
Starring Paul Giamatti and Da’vine Joy Randolph, both of whom won Golden Globes for their performances, alongside newcomer Dominic Sessa, The Holdovers follows staff and students at a prestigious boys’ boarding school who are forced to remain on campus over the Christmas period.
Every year, the film explains, some of the boys at Barton Academy find themselves with nowhere to go over the festive break, whether that be because they are international students, some sort of emergency occurs, or their parents have simply decided to go on holiday without them.
Naturally, then, a teacher must stay behind to supervise them while the school is closed, and for the winter break of 1970, that task has fallen to curmudgeonly ancient history teacher Paul Hunham, played by Giamatti.
Universally disliked by both students and faculty, Hunham lives full time at the school in his own apartment and runs his classes with an iron fist. He is strict and uncompromising and finds the Barton boys’ frequent misuse of their privilege offensive and infuriating, having attended the school himself on a scholarship.
So when he refuses to award a pass to one of the richest boys in his class, instead insisting on giving grades according to quality of work and therefore ruining the boy’s chances at an Ivy League education and the school’s receipt of more donations from his wealthy father, Hunham is punished by the headmaster and given the task of babysitting the “holdovers” at Christmas.
“I had a lot of experience with people like this, I mean, I went to a school like this, so I remembered these guys very well, I only went about 10 years after the movie takes place, so these guys weren’t that different,” says Giamatti, 56, who worked with Alexander Payne on his 2004 film Sideways.
“So there was a lot of that memory, and I have a lot of family memories, because my family’s all academics. Sometimes I didn’t even realise I was drawing on things.”
Partway through the Christmas break, all but one of the holdovers are whisked away on a skiing trip by a rich child’s father who has a change of heart about leaving his son at school over Christmas.
The one who remains, with Hunham unable to get hold of
his parents to ask permission for him to join his peers, is Angus Tully, played by Dominic Sessa.
Sessa, whose performance has won him the Critics’ Choice Movie Award for Best Young Performer, was cast through the drama department of his boarding prep school. He had never performed in front of a camera before, but had become something of a stage star at his school.
“Being at a boarding school, I can understand how heartbreaking it would be to be ready for break and then have your parents tell you that you can’t come home for Christmas,” says Sessa, 21.
“You understand that there’s this broken family dynamic going on behind the scenes
for him. He can be charming, innocent and one of those people you love to hate.”
Over the course of the film we see the intelligent but belligerent Tully frequently at loggerheads with oftenunrelenting Hunham, but their proximity, combined with the presence of a third character, Barton’s head cook, Mary Lamb, leads both boy and man to a lesson of respect and compassion.
Mary, played by Only Murders In The Building star Da’vine Joy Randolph, chooses to spend Christmas at Barton because it was the last place she spent time with her son, Curtis, a recent scholarship graduate of the school who was drafted into the army and killed in Vietnam.
Since Mary did not have the funds to send him to college, Curtis could not get out of his draft through student deferment, making this tragic story of loss also one of class and racial divide.
“Due to his race, it’s probably why they immediately enlisted him, why he probably was on the front lines the moment he enlisted,” says Randolph, 37.
“(The) Vietnam war is happening and these kids are hopping on jets and stuff. And that’s OK, it’s not their fault, they’re born into it. But that, I think, was an interesting concept.”
Randolph adds that at the beginning of the project she wanted to lean more into Mary’s race and how that separates her from
the overwhelmingly white, upper-class Barton boys, but that Payne felt more could be said in simply having her be.
“At the beginning, I was really adamant about it being like, I’m black, they’re white. And Alexander was like, ‘It’s there. The moment you pop on screen, it’s all laid in there. Trust it. And just be a human’,” she says.
“Which, for a while, I was like ‘No, we got to fill everything – you got to see Martin Luther King on my forehead!
“And then I realised, oh, it is working – just in the absence thereof, you’re just like, oh, she’s different from the others.”
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10.00 ITV News At Ten.* 10.30 STV News.*
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11.10 Born From The Same Stranger.* People born from anonymous donors search for blood relations. (R)
12.05 Trigger Point.* (R) 12.55 Trigger Point.* (R)
1.45 Night Vision.
3.00 Grantchester.* (R)
3.50 Night Vision.
5.05 Dickinson’s Real
university
Deal.*
(R)