THE HOLDOVERS

‘The Holdovers’: Three Sad Souls Stranded for Christmas

Alexander Payne’s jaunt to the past, with Paul Giamatti playing a curmudgeonly instructor at a 1970s boarding school, is crackling with pungent life.

“The Holdovers” takes place in New England somewhere, in 1970, at a tony, all-boys boarding school called Barton, where the students who can’t go home for Christmas wind up spending their breaks in the care of Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), the sourest, most pompous instructor the movie can find. He teaches ancient civilizations and prides himself on being the sort of principled educator who flunks senators’ kids and says stuff like, “Such are the vicissitudes of life” and “Listen, you hormonal vulgarian!” He smells bad, and breaks into Greek and Latin as much out of spite as bonhomie. The man can read everything but the room.

In fairness, the kids are no picnic, either. They set little traps for Hunham’s arrogance and sic their daddies on the administrators, who then bear down on him. Certainly, the glass eye he uses has made him only more risible to them. Now here he is, as stuck as the five castoffs he’s forced to oversee. And the minute it looks as if the movie’s set to be a deft prep-school caper that pits wily brats against a lemony know-it-all, it introduces a surprise. It’s a ritzy, laugh-out-loud Christmas miracle that whisks away four of the boys at the end of the first act. But one of them, an almost cool only-child named Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), can’t go because nobody can reach his parents. (He was ready to lounge on St. Kitts, but his mother takes off without him.)