"The Holdovers": They Do Make 'em Like They Used To

A cosy simulacrum of 1970's academic life – but where is the rest of the world?

The Holdovers, dir. Alexander Payne, screenplay David Hemingson (2023)

At sixty-two, director Alexander Payne is an acceptable age for grumbling about how “they don’t make ’em like they used to”. Perhaps he doesn’t make that complaint, I don’t know the man, but it’s easy to see how his latest film, The Holdovers, might be a response to that gripe. He has accepted the challenge and made a film of the kind that was made in the 1970s. For my money, though, more impressive than this technical feat is that he’s made a film that speaks so directly to the heart, by making a film with a big heart of its own.

That heart is kept beating by the interpersonal rhythms of the central characters in The Holdovers. Paul Giamatti plays a hunched, dour, yet loveable professor also named Paul, who teaches history at a private school in New England. This Classics-obsessed grump is obliged to keep his one good eye on a group of students with nowhere to go over the Christmas holiday. His cruelty towards these…