Old school: "The Holdovers"

Advance word on Alexander Payne's The Holdovers has been that this is cinema such as your grandmother used to make and/or enjoy. One could quibble with the finer details of that assertion - it's unlikely that a textured character piece of 1971 vintage would have been allowed to run as long as two hours and 13 minutes - but there remains a good deal of truth in it. Not for Payne, however, the freewheeling Super Seventies cinema that Paul Thomas Anderson, for one, has been drawn towards. Instead, The Holdovers follows in the doughty footsteps of that strain of 1970s cinema that was always foursquare and TV-adjacent - resulting in a project you can easily imagine inspiring its own small-screen spinoff(s). Seasoned TV scribe David Hemingson (Just Shoot Me, How I Met Your Mother, Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23) has here bequeathed Payne a sitcom-ready premise: three varyingly unhappy characters left behind for the holidays in the snowy confines of an elite New England boarding school for boys. This secular holy trinity keep separating off into funny odd couples: the tweedy, mansplaining classics tutor (Paul Giamatti), the angsty student abandoned by his rich folks (Dominic Sessa), the doubly bereaved dinnerlady (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) through whom this script can gesture towards real hurt and pain, as opposed to the rankling boys' martyr complexes. Only gesture, mind, for nothing here is allowed to cut too deeply or sting too long: it's a film that plays even the agonies of a dislocated shoulder for cosy, crowdpleasing chuckles.

If you can detach it from the murmurings that have accompanied its maker for the past few years, you'll likely have a reassuringly good time during The Holdovers, offering as it does comfort cinema par excellence. These characters aren't going anywhere fast, and nor is the film, and so - eased along by Payne's MOR music cues - you find yourself settling and snuggling into it; it's not a movie that puts up or invites much in the way of resistance. Narratively, it proceeds on a straight line, as if on castors, and the more glowing critical responses seem in large part like a response to that simplicity. Hemingson writes the kind of droll, waspish, sometimes outright snarky dialogue Payne himself has been known to produce and thus knows exactly what to do with. And the actors make the most of it. No-one currently working is better placed to play the gruff, self-deluding misanthrope than Giamatti, and there may not be a more Giamattian moment in the whole of cinema than the one here where he rejects a passing streetwalker's euphemistic offer of "candy cane" on the grounds that he's pre-diabetic. This is the definition of a greatest-hits turn: Giamatti plays the fussy and grouchy notes that made him a pass-agg star of sorts, we snicker accordingly, and everybody goes home happy, the actor possibly with a career-recognition gong or two.

Still, I did wonder from time to time whether Hemingson's idea of character business isn't a mite too easy - too televisual? - for the film's own dramatic good. We know Giamatti's Mr. Hunham isn't quite the tyrant he appears to the boys from an early interaction where he tells Randolph's Mary that her late son was one of his more perceptive students ("He thought you were an asshole." "Like I said..."). Both Hunham and Sessa's Angus, viewed in parallel throughout, really just need the one thing - sustained companionship - and, felicitously, that's the one and only thing this script can think of trading in. To the last, The Holdovers is genial entertainment, which you couldn't say of many recent American studio releases; yet set it against the satire of Citizen Ruth and Election - still Payne's best films - and it's insistently cosy, a film that doesn't just reclaim the centre ground abandoned of late by American movies but burrows doggedly into it for two-and-a-quarter hours. Every awards season, one film comes through because it doesn't lose all that much from being watched at home on screeners, nor if you doze off for ten minutes in the middle. Ironically the product of an old-school movie studio rather than one of these fancy, flashy streaming services, The Holdovers is very much the contender to beat on this front: a well-made TV movie, not without its TV-scaled laughs and pleasures, but a TV movie nevertheless.

The Holdovers is now playing in selected cinemas.