Have a merry sweet-and-sour ’70s Christmas with Paul Giamatti and company

Published 3:00 am Tuesday, November 7, 2023

At Barton Academy, the fictional all-male enclave in director Alexander Payne’s engaging gray-skies comedy “The Holdovers,” there are stuffy, imperious, demanding professors ― and then there’s Paul Hunham, the ancient civilizations specialist with a sub-specialty in student humiliation.

To Hunham, these boys with the hair (the year is 1970, when nobody thought much about barbers) and the attitude are either “cretins,” “vulgarians” or worse. This lonely man, typically tipsy by noon and dyspeptic by nature, has drawn the short straw this school year, requiring him to spend his winter holiday babysitting the “Christmas orphans,” the boys stuck at Barton for one reason or another.

This year’s holdovers include Hunham’s only decent student, the gangly, forlorn Angus. Smart kid. But arrogant. Meaning: He’s insecure and hurting. How this student, this instructor and the school’s resident cook, Mary, spend a few chilly scenes of winter together provides the storyline of “The Holdovers.” As to why it’s both funny and touching, at its best, well, Payne has had a few fallow years since “The Descendants” (2011), but here he reunites with Paul Giamatti, who co-starred in Payne’s “Sideways” (2004). To understate it, they work pretty well together.

Screenwriter David Hemingson’s conception of Hunham puts Giamatti’s character in the general vicinity of Professor Kingsfield, the fearsome adversary portrayed by Oscar-winning John Houseman in “The Paper Chase.” Hunham warms up later, which Kingsfield never did. But the first few scenes and a frustrating amount of the later ones settle for jokes and insults that are medium-grade at best.

Eventually, the script takes it easier and opens up to different possibilities and the idea that everyone’s in some sort of emotional crisis. The flinty, seen-it-all cook, played with powerful sadness by Da’Vine Joy Randolph had a son at Barton who graduated, went to Vietnam and didn’t survive. It’s Mary who periodically reminds Hunham that it being Christmas, he needn’t be his usual thoughtless self with an unhappy group of school-bound students.

Soon enough, all the boys get a reprieve from this un-holiday except Angus. At that point “The Holdovers” turns into a road trip odyssey for an unlikely trio. It’s an occasion for melancholy family matters, awkward reunions, stray reminders (when Hunham runs into an old classmate) of hidden disappointments — and a grateful acceptance of each other’s issues. Angus is played by the welcome and affecting newcomer Dominic Sessa; rarely have I seen more naturally convincing and relatable, slumpy body language in a movie about an 18-year-old.

Payne’s film is a half-and-halfer, let’s call it: Half genuine character study, mixing its tones deftly and well, and half artificial ‘70s, with characters boiled down to one or two clearly delineated traits and preoccupations.

For a lot of people, the holidays aren’t easy, whether or not they have money, or love, or a sympathetic family or a religion. This movie’s religion, if it has one, is the Church of Performance, and Giamatti, Sessa, Randolph and company make it worth attending.