The Holdovers review – brilliant Paul Giamatti hits the happy/sad sweet spot

Alexander Payne's story of a cantankerous teacher holed up for Christmas with a wayward teen and the school cook is expertly told with gentle, grownup comedy

The year’s best Christmas movie arrives in the UK a bit late for Christmas: it is a genial, gentle, redemptive dramedy from Alexander Payne which hits the happy/sad sweet spot with Payne’s sure aim. It is taken from TV writer David Hemingson’s impeccably crafted screenplay, a masterclass in incremental, indirect character revelations and plot transitions. The Holdovers is set in 1970, consciously (or maybe self-consciously) crafted to look like a film which its characters could have gone to see at the time, with the funny, rueful dialogue and melancholy sense of place that you might find in something by Hal Ashby or Bob Rafelson, and a madeleine soundtrack from Cat Stevens, Labi Siffre and more.

But of course it also looks like an Alexander Payne movie, with the spiky intergenerational negotiation, the road movie sadness, the odd-couple energy and the not-so-private life of a humiliated schoolteacher. Paul Giamatti plays Mr Hunham, a cantankerous classics master at a New England boys’ boarding school where he himself was once a pupil; he is a stickler for discipline and academic standards, nicknamed “Wall-Eye” due to his lazy eye. He is unmarried and lives at the school himself. With exquisite melancholy and cruelty, the film shows how he is in the same state of arrested-development bachelorhood as his pupils, but with squalor and disillusionment in his case considerably well advanced. Like Giamatti’s character in Payne’s film Sideways, Hunham is a drinker, though without any pretensions to connoisseurship. Like Matthew Broderick’s teacher in Payne’s Election, or indeed Reese Witherspoon’s character in Payne’s upcoming Election sequel Tracy Flick Can’t Win, Hunham has learned to absorb disappointment and frustration as part of the teacher’s working life.