Alexander Payne is the hipster’s Sinclair Lewis.
Alexander Payne’s analyses of small-man, small-town egotism separates him from other American Eccentric filmmakers. His comedies feature particular regional settings, but Payne’s self-consciousness seems to distance him from them. The cynicism that results looks like sophistication but may be nothing more than generational chagrin — a reluctance to appear sentimental or dully patriotic.
Payne updates Sinclair Lewis–style social criticism by detailing and satirizing the particular egoism of Americans in his time — whether the abortion culture of Citizen Ruth, Clinton-era political ambition in Election, cultural fragmentation in Sideways, the culpability of eminent domain in The Descendants, or alienation from the digital/green revolution in Downsizing. That’s why Payne’s hometown films (About Schmidt, Nebraska, and his American-abroad short-story segment of Paris, je t’aime) are modern versions of Lewis’s Main Street, Dodsworth, and Babbitt. Payne’s new movie, The Holdovers, continues that parochial examination, but the inclusion of recognizable (obvious) Millennial concerns makes it feel both estranged and contrived.
Payne sets The Holdovers in 1970 at a New England prep school, the Barton Academy, where former student Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) now teaches as a classics professor. Age, illness, and bad temper separate cross-eyed Hunham from the new generation of students emerging from the Sixties revolution, caught up in the threat of the Vietnam War. Hunham, stewing in his own obscurity and insecurity, resents their youthful privilege. He’s the Payne figure, and Hunham’s literary sophistication (calling students “philistines” and quoting Cicero in Latin) suggests the same cleverness that taints Payne’s movies, giving them a self-congratulatory air.
The school’s boys’ choir singing “Little Town of Bethlehem” in the opening sequence of snowy barns, covered bridges, and waterfalls is perched on the edge of sarcasm. Christmas break will leave Hunham, along with the school’s cafeteria administrator, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and a lonely, awkward student, Angus (Dominic Sessa), on duty at the vacated institution.
Payne’s holdovers represent Americans who are not part of countercultural or moon-landing progress. Hunham is stymied by flatulence, body odor, and anti-social instincts (“I’m drawn to the ascetic”); Angus, whose parents are divorced, is estranged from both his institutionalized father and his mother; Mary still grieves her son, a token black student at Barton who was drafted and killed in Vietnam.
This pity party is too transparently allegorical. As part of the indie hipster movement that commenced the offshoot of distinctively bright, gifted American Eccentrics, Payne — who is the same age as Barack Obama — shares that group’s skepticism about politics and privilege. In The Holdovers, Payne looks back at his formative era and rejects Sinclair Lewis’s patriotism for cynicism. He combines the specter of Vietnam with civil-rights guilt, which leads to the film’s worst flaw: Hunham’s confidante, the earthy, pathetic Mary.
Randolph, who played bawdy Lady Reed opposite Eddie Murphy’s Rudy Ray Moore in Dolemite Is My Name, fits liberal preconceptions — she’s bovine, religious, profane — unworthy of Payne’s talent. The Holdovers’ most pandering scenes sentimentalize Mary’s anger — unlike Hunham’s snideness and hyperhidrosis or Angus’s petulance. Payne succumbs to the white Hollywood smugness that can only imagine black women as Tiffany Haddish types. Mary’s caricature is almost as outrageous as Hong Chau’s shameful Vietnamese-refugee character in Downsizing. Payne’s idea of resolving this tale of outsiders is that Mary stops drinking and Hunham learns to lie and sacrifice himself for the unsociable kid, whom he saves from being drafted into the military.
Payne’s sops to political correctness are all that distinguish his trio of holdovers from Hattie McDaniel in Alice Adams, Monty Woolley in The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Jason Schwartzman in Rushmore, or any of the teens in a John Hughes movie. The Holdovers is eccentric but inferior. Payne’s hipster folktale shows he has lost any instinct for entertainment.