The Holdovers (Alexander Payne, 2023) wr. David Hemingson; Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, Da'Vine Joy Randolph; ancient history teacher forced to remain on campus over the holidays with a troubled student who has no place to go
Golden Globes 2024: Giamatti won Best Actor (musical or comedy), Randolph won Best Supporting Actress (same silly category)
Incisive film exposing the iniquity of inequity.
Wikipedia:
Wesley Morris of The New York Times praised Giamatti's performance and Payne's direction, writing, "Even as the story accrues the heft of personal tragedy, each scene seems to float or bob." Patrick Ryan, writing for USA Today, compared it to Frank Capra’s It's a Wonderful Life, noting that both films grapple with troubled pasts and shattered dreams at Christmastime. Critics have also compared it to the films of Hal Ashby, such as Harold and Maude and The Last Detail.
Reviews in The Boston Globe and Boston.com both praised the film's 1970s New England setting. Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post wrote that it "doesn't only have the look and feel of that time period, it resuscitates the finest elements of its narrative traditions". Richard Brody, writing for The New Yorker, described The Holdovers as "a pile of clichés", but one realized "with such loving immediacy that it feels as if Payne were discovering them for himself". Brody was more critical of the time period, arguing that the "hermetically sealed, historically reduced drama" ignored the politically fraught setting of the 1970s. Nonetheless, Michael Schulman, another writer for The New Yorker, included Giamatti, Sessa and Randolph in his list of the year's best performances, and considered the latter "in a prime position for the Best Supporting Actress race."
Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times praised the film's "enveloping sense of time and place", but as a whole, criticized it as "a flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic movie masquerading as a compassionate, humane one." Chang said that Mary Lamb, despite Randolph's affecting performance, was "somehow the movie's most under-developed role."
Garry Gillard | reviews | New: 1 January, 2024 | Now: 8 January, 2024