The Holdovers (2023)
Directed by Alexander Payne
A curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — a damaged, brainy troublemaker — and with the school’s head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.
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What critics say influenced The Holdovers
As “The Holdovers” morphs from miserablist odd-couple comedy to bittersweet road movie, it aims to remind you, sometimes with a hard nudge, of Hal Ashby classics like “Harold and Maude” and “The Last Detail”; an argument with a waitress automatically nods to Bob Rafelson’s “Five Easy Pieces.”
Evoking the cinematographic proclivities of 1970s filmmakers (the influential likes of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude and Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller pervade the fuzzy, 35mm cinematography), Payne reverberates the eras’ ambiance via faraway zooms, sentimental Labi Siffre and Cat Stevens’ needle drops, rustic prep-school environs, and darkly-lit oaken hallways.
As “The Holdovers” morphs from miserablist odd-couple comedy to bittersweet road movie, it aims to remind you, sometimes with a hard nudge, of Hal Ashby classics like “Harold and Maude” and “The Last Detail”; an argument with a waitress automatically nods to Bob Rafelson's “Five Easy Pieces.”
Featuring spiky intergenerational negotiations and intelligent repartee all-round , The Holdovers is often reminiscent of the best parts of Peter Weir's 1989 heart-breaking coming of age drama Dead Poets Society.
If you were expecting Robin Williams’s Mr. Keating, from Dead Poets Society, a harlequin who inspires his students with poetry and benevolence, you walked into the wrong classroom.
As “The Holdovers” morphs from miserablist odd-couple comedy to bittersweet road movie, it aims to remind you, sometimes with a hard nudge, of Hal Ashby classics like “Harold and Maude” and “The Last Detail”; an argument with a waitress automatically nods to Bob Rafelson's “Five Easy Pieces.”
And there's such spark mixed with pain in Sessa's young Dustin Hoffman-esque turn (a comparison reinforced when Paul and Angus hit the cinema to see western Little Big Man, which stars Hoffman, and by The Holdovers overall harking back to The Graduate times).
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In fact, Payne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld might cringe at this, but the snowy Barton campus even evokes a little bit of 1970’s “Love Story” (in the best way possible).
And there's such spark mixed with pain in Sessa's young Dustin Hoffman-esque turn (a comparison reinforced when Paul and Angus hit the cinema to see western Little Big Man, which stars Hoffman, and by The Holdovers overall harking back to The Graduate times).
The script feels reminiscent of any number of millennial adolescent dramedies; think of films like Jeffrey Blitz’s Rocket Science – to pull one randomly from the corners of memory – that matter most to those who saw them at just the right age.
It looks right. The strummed soundtrack reminds us of The Graduate. The performances are certainly on a par. But The Holdovers is more at home to redemptive sentimentality than Ashby or Altman would have allowed.
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Evoking the cinematographic proclivities of 1970s filmmakers (the influential likes of Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude and Robert Altman’s McCabe & Mrs. Miller pervade the fuzzy, 35mm cinematography), Payne reverberates the eras’ ambiance via faraway zooms, sentimental Labi Siffre and Cat Stevens’ needle drops, rustic prep-school environs, and darkly-lit oaken hallways.
Hunham talks to Angus a lot about the platonic ideal of a “Barton man.” They never lie or misbehave, they get good grades and go on to the Ivy League, and become, well, literal “kings of New England,” as Michael Caine’s character in The Cider House Rules says to the young men in his charge. Barton men are supposed to be destined for greatness.