Private Miseducation — The Holdovers review

A version of this appeared in The Scotsman.

Reuniting with Paul Giamatti for the first time since Sideways, Alexander Payne returns with one of his funniest, sharpest, and most humane comedies to date, an acutely observed redemption story, set during the silly season in 1970, but evergreen in its exploration of the chip-on-shoulder bitterness that comes with being smarter than the elites whose world its protagonist isn’t gutsy enough to reject.

A teacher of ancient history at a Massachusetts private boys’ school, Giamatti’s Paul Hunham has, instead, settled into a comfortable bubble-like existence, one where he can express his superior intellect in exasperated putdowns of his privileged students and take pride in daring to fail the blithely mediocre children of the rich and powerful as they glide through prep school en route to some well-remunerated, nepotism-sourced career.

Like Matthew Broderick’s more idealistically motivated educator in Payne’s 1999 classic Election, he views himself as a necessary hurdle in his students’ path through life. But his pomposity is about to catch up with him. With the fictional Barton Academy covered in snow and about to break for the Christmas holidays, he suddenly finds himself dragooned into looking after a handful of students unable to join their own families.

He knows he’s being punished for failing a senator’s son; as such, it’s not all that hard to be on Paul’s side, even before we realise he’s got a lazy eye and suffers from a genetic condition that gives him a fishy smell only partially disguised by the daily stench of booze and the pipe smoke emanating from him. The film doesn’t milk these afflictions to create sympathy, though. Working from David Hemingson’s smart, funny script, Payne and Giamatti work hard to ensure this wreck of a human transcends the tweedy clichés of the curmudgeonly academic.

We first get a sense that there’s more to him than meets the eye in the easy, empathetic bond he forms with Mary (the fantastic Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s Black cafeteria manager, whose son, a former Barton student, has recently been killed in Vietnam and who’s staying on at school because the prospect of spending her first Christmas without him is too much to bear by herself. When Paul admonishes one of his more arrogant charges for disrespecting her, we get the sense it’s borne out of some kind of deep-rooted class-consciousness, not just a progressive or showy sense of decency. 

But Paul’s grinch-like demeanour is also challenged by one of his students, Angus Tully, a petulant, unpopular, trouble-making smart-mouth, wonderfully played by newcomer Dominic Sessa. Abandoned at the last minute by his mother, who decides to use the Christmas break for an impromptu honeymoon with her new husband, Angus finds himself abandoned again when an impromptu plot twist reduces the number of student holdovers from five to one, meaning he has to see the rest of the holidays out with Mary and, ugh, Paul

What follows as this oddball trio negotiate the solitude of the holidays with bad TV, cheap booze, one slapstick medical emergency, and occasional trips off campus, isn’t exactly unpredictable, but the quiet ways in which it arrives at its moments of emotional catharsis, enlightenment and redemption (it is a Christmas story after all) hit harder for their nuanced execution. It helps that Payne immerses us so thoroughly in the cinematic world of its 1970/71 setting. Harking back to the rigorously unsentimental films of the New Hollywood era is a good fit for Payne, whose comic instincts have, in the past, sometimes erred towards condescending snark (see About Schmidt and The Descendants). Here he strikes a better balance, concocting a funny, bittersweet paean to the implicit value of learning to be less of an asshole in life.