The Holdovers review: It’s an A+ for Paul Giamatti’s trio of boarding school misfits, writes BRIAN VINER

The Holdovers (15, 133 mins) 

Rating:

The Holdovers is set in an all-boys boarding school in New England where crusty, irascible, world-weary classics teacher Paul Hunham (a role practically machine-tooled for the wonderful Paul Giamatti) has spent his entire career, having also been a pupil there back in the mists of time.

Giamatti won a Golden Globe earlier this month for his pitch-perfect performance, which marks his second collaboration with director Alexander Payne, 20 years after the brilliant Sideways (2004). But where Sideways was based on a novel, this is an original story, conceived by Payne but scripted, very nicely, by David Hemingson, an experienced TV writer but feature-film debutant.

This is Payne’s seventh film but only the second (after another beauty, 2013’s Nebraska) that he hasn’t written himself.

Nonetheless, like so many of the others (Sideways, Election, About Schmidt), it is a wry, intelligent, bittersweet comedy with cross-generational appeal (my son, in his 20s, liked it even more than I did).

The narrative is simple enough. It’s December 1970 and unmarried, unloved Mr Hunham is preparing for the holidays when the headmaster, who cordially loathes him, gives him the unenviable job of looking after the ‘holdovers’, the boys who for whatever reason can’t get home for Christmas.

Giamatti won a Golden Globe earlier this month for his pitch-perfect performance, which marks his second collaboration with director Alexander Payne, 20 years after the brilliant Sideways (2004)

Payne’s film is beautifully paced, genuinely funny at times and truly sad at others

One of them is a bright but rebellious lad called Angus (superbly played by newcomer Dominic Sessa), who ends up as the only holdover, resentfully holed up in a big, otherwise empty building in the strangest of menages-a-trois, with Mr Hunham and the African-American school cook, Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, also terrific and also a Golden Globe winner).

She has even more reason than the others to be angry at the world — her son has recently been killed in Vietnam — yet her humanity shines through her sadness.

By increments, this unlikely trio become friends, learning from each other as they do. That’s hardly a spoiler — going back to To Sir With Love (1967), The Blackboard Jungle (1955) and well beyond, teacher-pupil friction runs a predictable course in the movies.

But Payne’s film is beautifully paced, genuinely funny at times and truly sad at others. And he cleverly presents it in washed-out colours, almost as if it were made, not just set, in 1970. It’s another A+ for one of the best directors of his generation.