A movie from a bygone era…

One of the reasons why movies like this are successful is because these depict the 1970s as a decade where people lived beyond being wallowed in cynicism. Payne, to his credit, doesn't shy away from referencing Vietnam as well as the discourse on mental health.

By Amartya Acharya

It's one thing to set a movie in the 1970s; it's another to make it look like it was made in that decade. While the closest approximation could never completely captured the feeling of watching a movie shot on film, director Alexander Payne's The Holdovers comes pretty close. It's hard to remember the last time we saw ‘dissolve transitions’ and even a ‘screen wipe to the left’ in a modern movie. It's a stylistic choice befitting an era where even movies like The Holdovers would be commonplace as theatrical releases, besides larger tentpole movies.

The feeling of a movie from a bygone era permeates every frame of The Holdovers, where every theme of the film is spelt out by Latin honorifics or through dialogue. It's not a bad thing, though, when you have a director whose expertise is in crafting characters who are flawed yet lovable, and intensely humane, and for whom empathy is the only currency of the movie-watching experience.

For the curmudgeonly Mr Hannah (Paul Giamatti), the angry Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), or the melancholic Mary Curtis (D'Avine Joy Randolph), to look at them beyond these primarily developed adjectives is to use empathy as the key to unlocking their characters.

It ensures that the movie becomes a journey within a cosy setting. It tells the story of a family forged by being unwittingly stuck together and having to live through the holiday seasons. It also underscores the searing loneliness that the holiday season hits everyone, and how family, to a certain extent, becomes that lifeline.

It doesn't need to be the family you were born into. It could also be the family you create—the family that forces you to grow, to open up, and to be vulnerable. Credit to Payne that he doesn't make the film a saccharine chore, to make it feel good.

Paul Giamatti, as Paul Hannah, is an extension of Chuck Rhoades from Billions, without hyper-masculine aggression. It is hard enough to shed the skin of a character being depicted for over seven years. Giamatti's portrayal of Hannah still strikes a chord, with his intelligence, and yet, his boorish stuck-up-ness working as a fantastic foil for the angry and charismatic debutant Dominic Sessa, with whom Giamatti shares wonderful chemistry. D'Avine Joy Randolph is given a very sympathetic role to play, but the onus lies more on her than on the screenplay, and thus Randolph brings more to the character than the screenplay gives her.

But again, this is how Payne creates and envelops the world of this New England prep school as well as New England in the 1970s. One of the reasons why movies like this, or Are You There, God, It's Me, Margaret? are successful is because these depict the 1970s as a decade where people lived beyond being wallowed in cynicism. Payne, to his credit, doesn't shy away from referencing Vietnam as well as the discourse on mental health, even though it only has light, feathery touches.

While not his best work, his reunion with Giamatti (after 2004’s Sideways), produces one of the best films of this year and, of course, a future Christmas classic.

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Amartya Acharya is a reluctant engineer from the town of Jalpaiguri, nestled in North Bengal, and a scientist and teacher. Inwardly a cinephile, an armour of film critic hiding the romantic expectations of good stories in every form of media consumption.