The Holdovers isn’t a period film—or so Alexander Payne tells himself
Payne's low-key charmer nods to 1970s filmmaking, but it touches on timeless themes
Film Features The Holdovers
Christmas is coming early for cinephiles this year. The Holdovers, the long-awaited reteaming of classic comedy duo Paul Giamatti and Alexander Payne, rolls out in theaters nationwide on November 10, following a limited release at the end of October. Payne’s first starring vehicle for Paul Giamatti since 2004’s Sideways is a throwback dramedy straight out of the 1970s.
As ornery history teacher Paul Hunham, Giamatti and co-stars Dominic Sessa and Da’Vine Joy Randolph take audiences back to prep school. Set at Barton Academy, a Massachusetts-based boarding school, over Christmas break 1970, The Holdovers sees an intelligent teenage outsider, Angus (Sessa), stuck at school during the holidays with his least favorite teacher while his mom hits the ski slopes with her new husband.
Angus feels abandoned; all Holdovers do. Payne’s film, however, is as cozy as a wool sweater and a hot toddy. The movie also revels in its Nixon-era touches, which feel so authentic that they almost become another character on screen. Just don’t call the film a period piece.
“Let’s be clear,” Payne said during a recent conversation with the press about Holdovers, “it’s not just a period film. My collaborators and I gave ourselves the thought challenge experiment of time-traveling and pretending as though we were making a film shot in 1970 and ’71, and that the final film looks as though it might’ve been produced then. We’re making a contemporary film, pretending we’re in 1970.”
Pretending to be in 1970 while making a film in 2023 isn’t as easy as it sounds. But it did allow the filmmakers to be “banal and grimy … as though we were making a low-budget film then,” Payne continued. He added that the film’s locations feel real and lived in because “change comes slowly” to New England. According to Payne, the Massachusetts setting offered the Holdovers crew a unique opportunity. Many of the locations were “pretty much as they fell off the truck,” the director said. “The candlepin bowling alley and the cafe where Ms. Crane works, they’re as is, kind of locked in time from the ’40s or ’50s.”
Still, the overarching approach to the film’s aesthetic is to avoid being perceived as a costume film, which becomes challenging when herding hundreds of high schoolers into a dining hall. “There’s so many people in this movie, there’s so many clothes, half of which don’t appear on the screen,” said costume designer Wendy Chuck. “But the volumes. I would look at my assistant, I’d say, we’ve got to find more clothes. I’d go down to where the background was being fit and say, we don’t have enough clothes.”
As a born-and-bred Massachusettsan, screenwriter David Hemingson was “amazed at how spot on, how incredibly consistent and how historically accurate” the costuming was. “It was this combination of stuff that was very traditional with stuff that would’ve been contemporary at the time,” he added. “That gave a tremendous verisimilitude to the costumes. Like, the fact that people were dressing like they would’ve actually dressed in the truest sense of the word.”
To make this fictional boarding school feel real, production designer Ryan Warren Smith needed to “dress every part of the set” regardless of whether it was in the script because they wanted to ensure the actors had room to live. These spaces say a lot about the characters, from the book on Paul’s nightstand (Fear Strikes Out, a biography of Boston Red Sox centerfielder Jimmy Piersall) to what’s on his desk. Smith and set decorator Marcus Whiteman would dress “Paul’s desk drawer or something that he’s not supposed to open” with period-appropriate objects, just in case Giamatti feels the call of the desk drawer.
That doesn’t mean all of it has to be period-specific. Smith revealed “a little Easter egg,” a statue from The Sideways set, hidden in Paul’s office. It’s one of two nods to an extended Alexander Payne-iverse in the film. Wendy Chuck admits, “Lydia Crane (Carrie Preston) wears a heart-shaped necklace (and) Reese Witherspoon wore the exact same one in Election.” Thankfully, the Payne-iverse doesn’t spend too much time on Easter eggs. Instead, The Holdovers is a warm, funny, and emotionally winning film about people.
While The Holdovers harkens back to a time before digital editing and filmmaking, Payne and editor Kevin Tent realized that their approach to the film’s construction didn’t need much fine-tuning. “Yeah, we used some dissolves,” Tent said. But he added that they “always use dissolves.”
“We love ’em, and we probably have a few more than we normally do,” Tent admitted. “When Paul is yelling at the kids in the beginning, and it dissolves to the hallway, we’ve done that before. So, we really approached the film how we always do and just let our performances drive our decision-making.”
That’s probably why The Holdovers feels so effortless. The places, characters, and situations feel biographical, as if they happened to a real person. It’s a credit to the light touch but rigorous attention to detail Payne and his crew perfected across production. However, some of it just came naturally. Payne realized during the interview that slipping into that ’70s atmosphere was so easy because he’s always been doing that.
“Our film language in the previous films is kinda the same,” Payne said. “The same transitional techniques we use, it’s just that perhaps they stand out more in this one because it’s purposely, you know, it has the parlor trick of trying to appear like it’s from the ’70s. But our film grammar, I think, is basically we’ve been making ’70s movies the whole time.”
26 Comments
“The Holdovers isn’t a period film—or so Alexander Payne tells himself”
So then, who did he say this to: “it’s not just a period film.”
He LITERALLY said it’s a period film.
For fuck’s sake, AVClub AI, do better.
Every film is a period film, once enough time has passed.
at least 28 days.
I think I get what Payne means though. Yes, all movies become dated, but there is a difference between that and a “period piece” set in a time before it was made because those so often become nostalgia-tinted and have all these “clever” winks to the audience about characters predicting that computers will never catch on or that hula-hoop craze will last forever. It sounds like there will be little of that in this movie.
Wasn’t trying to be mean to Payne, just making a snarky response to the headline.
Seriously, give me some 2017 throwbacks, baby!
I confess I’m kind of looking forward to this. This was my coming-of-age period and I miss this era so I can’t wait to curl back up into it for two hours. I also love filmmaking of this time so if this even comes close to evoking that vibe I’ll be hooked. That said, Payne is coming off as a bit of a pill in interviews. The world not only looks very different it fundamentally feels different so, sorry guy, it’s a period piece. Payne is also annoyed that some critics have described a moderately upbeat (for Payne) period film set at Christmas as being “cozy.” Get over yourself and deal with it and just be grateful people like and are writing about one of your movies for the first time in decades.
“The Holdovers is a warm, funny, and emotionally winning film about people.”
That’s good, because Sideways was an annoying, unfunny film about pretentious assholes that tried as hard as humanly possible to not be likeable in any way. I guess the only way was up from there.
And up he went. The Descendants is one of my all-time favorite movies.
I’m not sure if there’s ever been a film that was more misunderstood by critics than The Descendants. So many reviews of that movie cited the irony of a wealthy white family fighting tooth and nail to save their land that shouldn’t have belonged to them in the first place as a negative, when that was the entire point of the movie. I guess even critics need filmmakers to bash them over the head with their intended messages.
I liked it, but then I knew people like Giamatti’s character. People who were really alcoholics but pretended they weren’t because they didn’t get drunk on cheap vodka or beer but expensive wine or Scotch.
“He’s one of those alcoholics who thinks he’s a collector.” – Lane Pryce, ‘Mad Men’.
I will never, ever understand this mindset. Basically all of my favorite novels, movies, and shows are packed with deeply flawed characters. I don’t get why some people feel they have to like characters to find them compelling, especially in comedies. Do you think Payne wanted you to empathize with the guys in Sideways? They’re supposed to be pretentious assholes!
‘Do you think Payne wanted you to empathize with the guys in Sideways?’
based on how the merlot line was interpreted by many people, im going to say many people thought we were supposed to.
The drained color scheme etc. have done a workman’s job taking this off the list of things I want to view. Little to nothing of worth came out of the ‘70s, I can’t understand the desire to keep reliving them in film form.Those who forget skin tight polyester corduroy in fecal earth tones are doomed to repeat them.
Bro…my dude…u mad? I hope y’know, bro-dude…there were other movies in the 1970’s other than The Godfather and Taxi Driver. I hope y’know. Pick this hill to die on? Bro.
Although Taxi Driver basically is about how the 1970s sucked. At least in NYC.
I can’t really speak to fashion or politics (they indeed sucked in the 70s), so let’s just hit some easy highlights as decade bookends, 1971 (to avoid “well it was really made in 69”) and 1979 to refute your edgelord claim:Music: What’s Going On; London Calling.
Film: A Clockwork Orange; The French Connection.
TV: All in the Family; Taxi
Space: Apollo 15 (rover!); Space Shuttle Enterprise
Celeb Births: Snoop Dogg; Natasha Lyonne
The Clean Air, Voting Rights, Occupational Health and Safety Acts, Roe v Wade, New Hollywood, All the President’s Men, Gravity’s Rainbow, Roots, classic work by John LeCarre, Ursula LeGuin and (if you like) Stephen King, Curtis Mayfield, Joni Mitchell, Herbie Hancock, Fela Kuti, Talking Heads, The Voyager Program, and foundational work by Stephen Hawking AREN’T FREAKIN’ GOOD ENOUGH FOR YA?!?
Not to mention personal computers. Apple, Commodore (RIP), Radio Shack (RIP), and Atari (RIP, sort of, the current Atari is a new company that bought the name) all released their first computers in the 1970s.
Second wave feminism and home video FFS!
FWIW, you’re missing out on what I think was my favorite film of the year. Mileage may vary, of course.
Hey, I came out of the ‘70s! 😂
So it’s a costume period piece. Got it.
I wonder if the cafe interior is the Pleasant Cafe in Roslindale. That’s a pizza place just a walk from home that was also used in The Boston Strangler, from earlier this year. If so, the mindblowing thing is that the exterior wasn’t used in either film, as it’s perfect for a movie set from the 1930s to the 1970s, with its neon signs with green and red backings, rounded angles, and brick. They’d just have to crop out the billboard above the restaurant.
the headline claims Payne think it isnt a period film and in the quote he clearly says ‘not just a period film’ i hope somebody gets fired for that blunder