[COLUMN] The Holdovers is a Sweet - but Shallow - Love Letter to New Hollywood | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers was released on premium video-on-demand this week.

It’s a movie that seems perfectly situated for that space between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Universal’s release window strategy suggests that it will end up on Peacock, the company’s streaming service, in time for Christmas. The film has already been hailed as a “new Christmas classic” and is one of the favorites going into this year’s awards season. The Holdovers has been lauded by critics and embraced by audiences, earning an “A” CinemaScore.

It is easy to understand why this is. The Holdovers is very good. Set at a prestigious New England boarding school over the Christmas holidays of 1970, The Holdovers focuses on the relationship between three unlikely colleagues who find themselves stuck together during the break: history teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), cook Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) and student Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa). Over the course of their time together, they come to a mutual understanding.

It is perfect seasonal fare, a gentle festive character study. Paul and Angus are initially closed off and hostile to one another, but they eventually open up to one another. Through this bonding, each acknowledges the scars that they have been nursing. The Holdovers is sincere, heartwarming and often wonderfully funny. Giamatti remains one of the best actors working, and it’s great to see him reteaming with Payne. Sessa, a student at one of the schools where the film was shot, is a revelation.

The Holdovers is an obvious love letter to a particular era of American cinema. Payne talked about programming a miniature film festival for his young star. “I ran The Graduate, The Landlord, Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Klute, Paper Moon, and maybe All the President’s Men,” he explained. “We weren’t trying to consciously emulate the look and feel of any single one of those films, but we all wanted to splash around in the films of our contemporaries, had we been making a movie then.”

When Francis Ford Coppola took an unfinished cut of Apocalypse Now to Cannes in 1979, he warned journalists, “My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.” To a certain extent, the same is true of The Holdovers. This is not a film about 1970s America. It is a film attempting to be 1970s America. “It was a thought experiment I would say I gave to myself and my team,” Payne stated. “We’re making a film set in the 1970s. What if we tried to make it look and feel as though it had been made in 1970?”

The Holdovers isn’t just well-written and well-performed. It is a triumph of production. Production designer Ryan Smith skilfully evokes the decade in which the film is set. Composer Mark Orton provides a soundscape rooted firmly in that era. Cinematographer Eigil Bryld shot The Holdovers on a digital camera, the ARRI Alexi Mini, but the image is lovingly treated to evoke films of the period. It adds to the warmth of the movie. If one squints, it looks like a lost artifact of New Hollywood.

It is appropriate that Paul teaches the classics, lecturing students about the importance of history and antiquity. “If you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past,” Paul advises his young student as they tour a museum of antiquity. “You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.” The Holdovers is very conscious of its setting and its deliberate invocation of the past.

Still, there is something uncanny about all of this. The movie opens with a period-accurate Universal logo. However, Payne and his team had to create a suitably retro logo for Miramax, a company that wasn’t founded until 1979. More broadly, there’s a gentleness to The Holdovers that seems at odds with the harder edge that defined so many of the comedy-dramas of the period. The Holdovers feels safe and cosy in a way that something like Harold and Maude or The Graduate does not.

Payne is evoking a wave of movies defined by their sense of urgency and timeliness. The New Hollywood movement emerged as a reaction against the staid classicism of musicals and period epics, offering viewers something more naturalistic and contemporary. It was an era when, in the words of Steven Gaydos, “Nonconformity, provocation, and experimentation were mainstream.” Films routinely pushed the boundaries of what was possible in the medium, technically and culturally.

Obviously, there was some nostalgia baked into the New Hollywood movement. Many filmmakers took advantage of their success to make loving tributes to genres they had loved as children, with Peter Bogdanovich directing the black-and-white Depression-set Paper Moon and the screwball throwback What’s Up, Doc? Indeed, the era saw a revival of classic 1930s genres like westerns and gangster films, its own nostalgic invocation of an era long gone.

However, these throwbacks had a thoroughly modern sensibility. The Godfather might have been set in the 1940s, but it was on the cutting edge of film culture. Revisionist westerns like Little Big Man, which Paul and Angus watch in The Holdovers, interrogated the mythology of Manifest Destiny. While Martin Scorsese made New York, New York as a loving tribute to classic musicals, the film dealt with more realistic elements like domestic abuse and abortion.

Many of those films spoke aggressively to their current moment. All the President’s Men was a movie about the Watergate Scandal released less than two years after Richard Nixon resigned. Movies like Coming Home and The Deer Hunter confronted the scars of the Vietnam War. The “new” in New Hollywood was not just an affection. This gets lost in nostalgia for the era. The Exorcist was firmly rooted in its present, which means the nostalgia in The Exorcist: Believer somewhat misses the point.

This may be why, as good as The Holdovers is, it ironically feels like a retreat from the virtues of the cinema that he seeks to invoke. Payne’s nostalgia for the era is sincere and well-intentioned. Even before The Holdovers, Payne was a director heavily influenced by the New Hollywood movement. His films felt like spiritual successors to those classic films, carrying their philosophy forward into the 21st century. Payne’s films were thorny, complicated, and adult attempts to wrestle with the world.

Alexander Payne was part of the wave of directors to emerge during the 1990s, a class that includes icons like Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, and Paul Thomas Anderson. These filmmakers arrived at a crucial moment for Hollywood, when it was still possible to make reasonably-budgeted mainstream movies that could be targeted at an adult audience. This is part of the mythology of 1999 as “one the best film years ever”, as it represented a culmination of that moment.

Payne’s filmography spoke to that. Citizen Ruth is a black comedy in which a pregnant alcoholic (Laura Dern) finds herself in the midst of a cynical culture war over abortion. One of those 1999 movies, Election is the story of a teacher (Matthew Broderick) whose response to a sex scandal involving a fellow teacher (Mark Harelik) is to undermine the teenage victim (Reese Witherspoon). About Schmidt focuses on a retired widower (played by 1970s icon Jack Nicholson) trying to figure out his new life.

Sideways, Payne’s previous collaboration with Paul Giamatti, is about two friends (Giamatti and Thomas Hayden Church) on a wine-tasting trip. Critic Owen Gleiberman argued that Sideways typified Payne’s style, “the new New Hollywood classicism that’s bubbly and spontaneous but always masterfully controlled.” Payne’s fondness for the road movie – About Schmidt, Sideways, Nebraska, and even The Holdovers are all road movies of a sort – may owe a lot to New Hollywood.

To be fair, The Holdovers might be something of a strategic move from Payne. His last film, the high-concept science-fiction comedy Downsizing, was a box office disappointment that opened to poor reviews. It was a big swing from a director who was best known for his grounded character dramas. In contrast, The Holdovers feels like a safe choice. It’s Payne playing the hits, doing what audiences and critics enjoy watching him do, with his influences made even more obvious than usual.

Of course, there is a broader context at play. Hollywood is in a state of turmoil at the moment. For the past decade or so, big budget blockbusters have gradually squeezed adult-skewing movies like those that Payne makes out of cinemas. However, now even those gigantic surefire blockbusters are also struggling. Movies and television shows are being removed from streaming services or simply not being released at all.

It recalls the chaos of the studio system during the 1960s, which led to the New Hollywood movement that Payne so lovingly evokes. It’s a darkly comic touch that Hollywood is pushing a big-budget Cleopatra film into existence, given how that worked out sixty years ago. From the rubble, there are signs that audiences want something new. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, one of the highest-grossing movies of the year, feels like a spiritual successor to those thorny 1970s films.

To be clear, The Holdovers is a really enjoyable and well-made movie that is garnering a deservedly enthusiastic response. It is a joy to watch. Still, it feels like something of a regression for Payne, a director who has spent his career pushing the spirit of 1970s American cinema forward into the present. The Holdovers finds Payne withdrawing into the comforts of the past. It embraces the aesthetics of New Hollywood, but not its spirit.