You may have heard about StoryCorps’ One Small Step initiative, which brings together strangers with different political views to talk to each other about who they are as people. The idea is to remind us of our humanity, rather than focusing on what divides us.
That last part is at the heart of Alexander Payne’s empathetic new film The Holdovers, which finds Paul Giamatti as a surly history instructor at a boys’ boarding school in 1970s New England, an instructor who’s hated by all the students partly because he does nothing to hide his contempt for all of the entitled rich kids trying to skate through their classes before going on to whatever rich person thing they’ll do for the rest of their lives. Giamatti is forced to stay at the school over winter break to monitor a student who can’t go home, one who’s plenty surly in his own right, and the two can do nothing but spend time together, along with the woman who runs the school’s kitchen, and whose son was recently killed in Vietnam.
We’ve seen this kind of story before, but the warmth with which Payne shows the humanity in his characters helps each one of them unfold into a real, complex person. And it’s not even that anyone is different from what we thought, it’s just that each person is so much more. Payne’s warmth extends to the filmmaking itself, too, with the richness of film grain added to the picture, and techniques that call back to movies of the 1970s. The acting is unsurprisingly excellent, maybe especially from Da’Vine Joy Randolph as the kitchen head, who’s much softer and more subtle than I’ve seen from her before.
The most emotionally affecting parts of movies often aren’t found in major events, but in the small movements of characters that give us all a better understanding of our humanity. These aren’t necessarily easy shifts to make, but we also don’t need to make things complicated—sometimes it’s just a matter of talking to each other.
The Holdovers is in theaters.
