The Holdovers

Alexander Payne did not invent the premise. He saw Marcel Pagnol’s 1935 Merlusse at Telluride in 2011 and took from it the boys with nowhere to go at Christmas and the disliked teacher with a bad eye. The story sits at Christmas 1970, and it also wants to pass as an object made in 1970. Cinematographer Eigil Bryld tested period stock and abandoned it, saying it gave him neither the grain nor the contrast he wanted, so he shot digitally with a LUT on set imitating early seventies emulsion and left the wear to the colour grade. Even the studio emblems over the opening were redrawn to look of their time. Five separate Massachusetts schools stand in for the single fictional Barton. Dominic Sessa, who plays Angus, was a pupil at one of them, Deerfield Academy, and had never worked in front of a camera; the stiffness beside Giamatti is real inexperience rather than a choice. Five Academy Award nominations yielded one win, Da’Vine Joy Randolph for supporting actress, with picture, actor, original screenplay and editing all lost. A good fit if you count the redrawn emblems and the imitated stock as the substance of the thing rather than a gimmick. Not for anyone who wants the rough edges of a first time actor smoothed away in the boy.