Ever notice the way Christmas stories often have some grouchy crab who hates all goodness and badly needs redemption?
I suppose Ebenezer Scrooge would be the founding chairman of this group — though we might also go back to the murderous King Herod in the Bible’s original nativity tale. And of course, there’s Dr. Seuss’s Grinch in one book and three films — along with the curmudgeonly Mr. Potter in the classic movie It’s a Wonderful Life.
To this auspicious list you can add Paul Hunham, one of two protagonists in Alexander Payne’s sensational new gem, The Holdovers.
Payne is the writer-director behind such well-reviewed films as Election, About Schmidt, The Descendants, Sideways and Nebraska. While he did not script this newest, it bears all the hallmarks of his other thoughtful, engaging and character-driven stories.
I cannot recall a 2023 movie that I liked better.
The ever-reliable Paul Giamatti (John Adams, Cinderella Man, Saving Mr. Banks) plays Hunham, a bitterly strict and misanthropic history teacher at the fictional Barton prep school in 1970s Massachusetts.
One dismal gray Christmas season, the aging, single Hunham is tasked with an assignment no staffer wants: He will essentially serve as babysitter for a mismatched group of students who are not going home for the holidays.
Two are so young that they don’t fit in with the older high-schoolers, and the others have already clashed with Hunham, who has a reputation for dreary homework and miserable grades. Also staying is Mary Lamb, the campus’s kindly but struggling black cook, who recently lost her only son in Vietnam. (Keep in mind that most of the kids Mary feeds will never have to serve, as they are headed for college and therefore, at that time, exempt.)
Chief among the young holdovers is Angus Tully, a decent student whose exciting vacation plans were scuttled when his recently remarried Mom decided instead to enjoy a honeymoon with her new husband.
Hunham is not all hatred and misery like, for example, Scrooge or Potter — and he certainly sympathizes with Mary’s hardships, which his charges do not. Nonetheless, both he and Tully — who misses his real father, and whose angry rebellion has already gotten him tossed from three other schools — will have to learn to treat each other decently: to open up about their troubled pasts, and to embrace the sorts of risks that hurt people don’t normally take for one another.
As always with Payne, the acting is exceptional, with standouts including the two leads, along with Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary and Jim Kaplan as an outcast student from Korea who is missing his family.
Better yet, Payne and his writer, David Hemingson — who is basically making his debut here — really underplay the inevitable redemption; the film’s finale is genuinely heartwarming without feeling shallow, maudlin or manipulative. At the same time, they’ve peppered the story with subtle but suitable references to Dickens’s Christmas Carol (i.e, the pawn shop and graveyard near the end — and of course, young Scrooge being left behind at school).
And the movie — which, incidentally, is currently streaming only on Peacock — looks gorgeous. Its opening frames have an enchanting Christmas-card quality, while the way Payne and crew evoke the early 1970s is — at least for Boomers like me — so nostalgic as to be almost intoxicating.
And of course, as I’ve often pointed out in these reviews: Christmas music, movies and other observances tend to key on this melancholy magic of the past.
Speaking of which: Nearly every year at holiday time, I put together a list of under-the-radar Christmas films. This one is going right at the top of next year’s roster.
But don’t wait till then.
