Is it possible that there’s a new classic holiday film dropping down our chimneys?
This week we check out a contender for that title, Alexander Payne’s seasonally appropriate — for December — “The Holdovers.”
Take that perennial Christmas chestnut you watch time and time again. Sprinkle in elements of “Dead Poets Society.” Then let someone like the late filmmaker Hal Ashby, who graced us with “Harold and Maude,” baste it and bake it.
That somewhat conveys what you have with Alexander Payne’s holiday-themed treat, a droll but fragile character study about three loners stuck together in 1970 at a snowy New England prep school during what’s allegedly the “most wonderful time of the year.”
Payne has always specialized in giving us multi-dimensional, quirky individuals, characters you sometimes like and sometimes simply can’t stand. In essence, they’re flawed and act an awful lot like you and me. That’s true of the trio that screenwriter David Hemingson crafts with such genuine and delicate care. They include a crabby professor (Paul Giamatti, who had his breakthrough role in Payne’s “Sideways) whose pontifical retorts are often anchored to arcane historical references that no one can understand; a grieving Black chef (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, channeling every genuine emotion the script calls for) spending her first Christmas without her son, killed in Vietnam; and a brainy but volatile teen (Dominic Sessa, a welcome newcomer) who got pawned off by his mom and her new and wealthy husband.
They are very different people with a common ailment: each is nursing deep-seated pain.
It’s one of Payne’s best funny-sad films, and it’s steeped in a nostalgic fondness for early ‘70s filmmaking — evident in the throwback credits and in the film’s faded color palette and unrushed pacing. That does mean it takes its meandering time to get to the “meat” of the story — if you can call it that — but patience proves out as “Holdovers” fleshes out its leads and reveals their secrets and the intense feelings inside each of them.
For that reason and others (including the soundtrack), “The Holdovers” is way tastier than your average holiday movie leftovers. Payne brings to the vast tableau of Christmas films a departure — a movie about three lonely people having a dickens of a time connecting and dealing with their feelings until they get thrown together to find comfort and joy from each other. And isn’t that exactly what the holidays are supposed to do? Details: 3½ stars out of 4; in theaters Nov. 3.
Contact Randy Myers at soitsrandy@gmail.com.
