Alexander Payne
The holdovers - Lezioni di vita

Alexander Payne has never been the kind of director cinephiles foam at the mouth for. He doesn't do gothic like Tim Burton, doesn't do symmetry porn like Wes Anderson, and wouldn't be caught dead playing 4D chess like Nolan. What he does do is tell more or less "normal" stories with a twist of cynicism and a generous dose of human frailty. His characters tend to be deeply flawed, mildly unpleasant, and inconveniently real - a refreshing antidote to most modern productions.

He first got attention, in a polite, Midwestern kind of way, with Election in 1999, starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick. Election is a pitch-black comedy that probably never made it past customs in Italy. It features a cast of thoroughly unsympathetic characters and gives us one of the rare Reese Witherspoon performances where she doesn't play America's sweetheart, but rather America's terrifyingly ambitious overachiever.

Then came - in random order - About Schmidt, The Descendants, Nebraska, and the cult darling Sideways (2004), where Paul Giamatti played a depressed wine snob whose greatest love was a grape. Giamatti returns in The Holdovers, playing another grumpy, socially awkward, unlucky-in-love intellectual. If you watched Sideways, you might wonder if it's the same character, just older, with worse eyesight and a litany of health issues.

Professor Paul Hunham is a walking cliché with elbow patches, an unpopular classics teacher sentenced to babysit a group of students stuck at their New England boarding school over Christmas break. Soon, the group dwindles to one: Angus Tully, the kind of smart, angry kid who makes you regret ever romanticizing youth. Add Mary Lamb, the school's cook grieving the recent loss of her son in Vietnam, and you have a trio of misfits with no choice but to eat, argue, and quietly bond in the snow-covered purgatory of 1970 academia.

There are so many ways this could have gone wrong. A lesser film would have opted for cheap redemption arcs, emotional manipulation, or an uplifting finale featuring hugs and healing. But Payne resists all that. Instead, The Holdovers is a slow burn of mutual tolerance turning into quiet respect. No grand epiphanies, no saccharine sermons. Just three damaged people who stop pretending they don't need anyone and one minor quibble: Professor Hunham's mention that teaching at his college is his whole life telegraphs a likely turn of events, robbing the film of some surprise.

The story is small, the scope modest, and the style reassuringly old-school. It even earned a Best Picture nomination - not to win, obviously, but to acknowledge a decent screenwriter and director who still manages to make movies with a beating heart. Worth noting: Payne already has two Oscars as a screenwriter for Sideways and The Descendants, so he's hardly scrounging for validation.

Set in what looks like the frostbitten armpit of a New England winter, it's the perfect film to watch when summer is melting your brain. It won't blow your mind, but it might quietly thaw something in your chest. Available on Netflix.