Peacock streams ‘The Holdovers’
Will “The Holdovers” join the ranks of Christmas classics? It streams exclusively on Peacock starting today.
Or will it fall into obscurity like thousands of others? The 2023 holiday drama reunites director Alexander Payne with Paul Giamatti, who starred in his 2004 comedy “Sideways.”
Released in October to near-universal acclaim, “The Holdovers” is set at a small prep school at Christmas. It’s 1970, the year “Love Story” introduced America to the word “preppy” as a term of both scorn and endearment.
Giamatti stars as Paul Hunham, a strict classics teacher whose uncompromising approach to discipline and grades has made him a pariah among his peers and earned him a dreadful reputation with students. He’s on thin ice after failing a wealthy donor’s son and losing the school a significant endowment.
Hunham is exacting with everyone and hardest on himself. When students go home over the holidays, he’s put in charge of the gaggle of boys whose families are either too far away or too indifferent to include them in their plans. After one wealthy father promises to whisk them all away in a helicopter, the miserable teacher is left with only one “holdover,” Angus (Dominic Sessa), as well as Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s head cook and a woman grieving the loss of her son.
The three will bicker and bond over their unusual holiday, coming to grips with deeply felt loss and disappointment. Giamatti, seen recently in the justcompleted run of “Billions” on Showtime, is well suited to his character here, a man whose difficult nature is rooted in self-loathing.
“Holdovers” is steeped in the music of its era. A soundtrack, including music by the Allman Brothers, Herb Alpert, Shocking Blue, Cat Stevens and Tony Orlando & Dawn, has been released.
Given its dark themes of heartache and dislocation and its nostalgic tone, “Holdovers” may seem a lock for inclusion in the Christmas movie pantheon. But nothing is a given in this category.
For every “It’s a Wonderful Life” there are a billion forgotten cookie-cutter Hallmark and Lifetime distractions. For years, NBC tried to turn the 2000 supernatural fantasy “The Family Man,” starring Tea Leoni and Nicolas Cage, into a holiday tradition. It was a genuinely moving film. But somehow it never quite made the cut.
On the surface, “Family Man” seemed much more likely to join the immortals than “Love Actually,” a 2003 ensemble production with a subplot deeply rooted in British politics about Prime Minister Tony Blair’s seemingly servile relationship with American presidents Clinton and Bush. But it has defied expectations (mine at least) to be embraced by viewers.
So will “The Holdovers” hold up over the years? Who knows? I’d say it has a much better chance than Peacock’s other 2023 Christmas movie, “Genie,” starring Melissa McCarthy and written by “Love Actually” scribe Richard Curtis. All the mistletoe in the world couldn’t make me watch that again.