The Holdovers review: Paul Giamatti emerges as Cillian Murphy’s Oscars rival in a comedy set to become a Christmas classic

Alexander Payne wants us to know we are in the early 1970s. The Holdovers, a delightful comedy with a salty aftertaste, layers wads of generalised anxiety about its journey to self-realisation. The faultless Paul Giamatti, who is probably Cillian Murphy’s greatest threat at the Oscars, plays an unyielding teacher, much given to Marcus Aurelius, enduring Christmas with a neglected student and the boarding school’s bereaved cook. All the brewing Nixonian uncertainties are there. Paul Hunham, whom Giamatti allows only hollow dignity, is still shouldering the consequences of his own institutional scandals. Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), the fragile teenager, cannot connect with uncaring parents. Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) is grieving a son killed in Vietnam. Very 1970.

It’s not just that. The film begins with the vintage Universal logo – the one you see before Columbo – and a contemporaneous certificate from the Motion Picture Association of America. Eigil Bryld does shoot digitally, but he makes sure to include “lots of yellow tonality” in the period-perfect palette. We are being begged to think of Hollywood’s legendary postclassical anni mirabiles. Francis Ford Coppola. Robert Altman. Hal Ashby. All that.

In truth, The Holdovers, from a screenplay by the TV writer David Hemingson, is not quite in the same game. It looks right. The strummed soundtrack reminds us of The Graduate. The performances are certainly on a par. But The Holdovers is more at home to redemptive sentimentality than Ashby or Altman would have allowed. The film’s attitude to Hunham is similar to that of Mash (the TV version) to Margaret Houlihan or The Paper Chase (again, the TV version) to Prof Kingsfield. Disdain of the flinty authority figure can only be carried on so long. If anyone believes Hunham isn’t going to soften then they have somehow failed to encounter a little yarn called A Christmas Carol.

Arriving here three months after its debut in the United States – bah, humbug! – The Holdovers is set to become one of the great Christmas films. All the best traditional Yuletide hits follow the template of Dickens’s indestructible tale. (It is George Bailey rather than Mr Potter who goes through the Scrooge arc in It’s a Wonderful Life.) This time around, each of the three stranded grumps gains some sort of wisdom. Okay, the film may not have the ruthless eye of Midnight Cowboy, but, as an adventure in humanist diversion, it could hardly be bettered.

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Hunham, a man with no emotional attachments, hardly seems to mind when, in mild disgrace for marking down the son of a major donor, he is ordered to spend Christmas at the posh private school with a clutter of “holdover” students. He demands that they study throughout Christmas. He allows only meagre decoration. “And the union workhouses? Are they still in operation?” he doesn’t exactly say. When a particularly well-off student takes all the holdovers bar Angus on a skiing holiday, Hunham is left with just him and Mary. They somehow end up at a disastrous party. They make for Boston, where – always a surprise to those on this side of the pond – everything seems open on Christmas Day. All three loosen up a bit to one another.

One can barely imagine The Holdovers with a different cast. Making his movie debut, Sessa brilliantly finesses vulnerability into unconvincing aggression. Giamatti, who broke through in Payne’s Sideways, has always been a master of befuddled distraction. Da’Vine Joy Randolph, apparently nailed down for an Oscar, somehow remains hollowed-out and fired-up throughout. She makes the very best of a signature speech that says just enough without risking the maudlin.

Some may still baulk at the conventional structure. But conventions emerge for a reason. An absolute treasure. Merry Christmas to you all.

The Holdovers opens in cinemas on Friday, January 19th