Review: 'The Holdovers' is a teacher/student comedy reheated from the classics, enlivened by strong performances

It’s been 19 years since director Alexander Payne and actor Paul Giamatti teamed up to create the indelible portrait of middle-age misery that was “Sideways” — so there is infinite hope that their new collaboration, the  comedy-drama “The Holdovers,” would be a little less formulaic.

It’s December 1970, at Barton Academy, a small Northeastern boarding school. The most universally disliked person at Barton is history teacher Paul Hunham, played by Giamatti as a crank whose uncompromising grading irritates both the students, who are the targets of his withering sarcasm, and the dean, Dr. Woodrup (Andrew German), who worries the rich parents won’t keep writing the checks if Hunham flunks their boys.

Among the students, the least liked is the arrogant Angus Tully (played by newcomer Dominic Sessa), who gloats that he’s spending Christmas break in St. Kitts with his mother and new stepfather. Then he gets a call from his mother, who has decided that the Caribbean vacation will be her honeymoon — and tells Angus that he can’t come along. Angus becomes one of the “holdovers,” kids who have nowhere to go home for the Christmas break. The teacher assigned to watch those kids is, of course, Hunham.

Hunham sticks to the school manual, trying to organize lessons and athletic activity for the boys. But when the other boys are given a chance to go off with one classmate’s rich family — who send a helicopter — Angus is left behind, because he can’t contact his mom to give her approval. So the rest of the holiday, it’s just Angus, Hunham and the school’s head cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vie Joy Randolph), who recently lost her son, a Barton alum, in the Vietnam War.

Screenwriter David Hemingson, a TV guy making his feature debut, leans heavily into the “Dead Poets Society”/“Goodbye, Mr. Chips” space — but making the main teacher a grouchy misanthrope who drinks a little too much Jim Beam. There’s a rote predictability to the beats of the story arc, as Hunham and Angus slide from butting heads to grudging respect to camaraderie.

Thankfully, Payne’s deft handling of characters makes the journey worthwhile. Sessa is a real find, deftly capturing the prickly emotions of an abandoned 15-year-old. And Randolph, with a few short strokes, gets the pain of a mother who has lost the only important thing in her life.

But “The Holdovers” ultimately is Giamatti’s show, and he makes the most of it — creating a detailed character who uses his wit and irascibility to paper over a life of failures and lost chances. 

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‘The Holdovers’

★★★

Opens Friday, November 10, in theaters. Rated R for language, some drug use and brief sexual material. Running time: 133 minutes.