Why ‘The Holdovers’ Is the Best ’70s Film Since the 1970s

It is fitting that the 50th anniversary of 1974, probably the greatest year in screenwriting and arguably the greatest year in all of film history, should have yielded one of the finest films of the last half-century. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers (2023) is not just set in the 1970s (to be exact, the winter of 1970 and 1971) but is a 1970s-type film, one that delights in writing, directing, and acting that is as blurred, muted and mutable as life itself, like all the best movies of that fabled decade. Indeed, The Holdovers is almost certainly the best ’70s film since the ’70s itself.

Read More: Mastering the Script: 2024 Oscar-Nominated Screenplays

Alexander Payne: A ’70s Director in the 21st Century

In promoting The Holdovers, writer/director Alexander Payne made much of the 1970s comparisons that critics, audiences, and even other filmmakers made about his new film. According to a Letterboxd article, Payne said: “In a way, I’ve been making ’70s movies my whole career. I focus on what I hope are very human stories, as opposed to stories of device, convention, or contrivance. I like having a protagonist and story who approximate real life much more than movie life.”

Again, it is fitting that a “1970s Director,” even one working in the 21st century, should provide such a precise definition of what made the 1970s Hollywood’s Second Golden Age. The best ’70s films focused, as Payne suggests, on “very human stories, as opposed to stories of device, convention or contrivance,” and their protagonists and stories certainly “approximate[d] real life much more than movie life.”

‘Harold and Maude’ (1971)

That was particularly true of the greatest films of the first half of the 1970s, such as Harold and Maude (1971), The Godfather (1972), The Godfather Part II (1974), Chinatown (1974), The Conversation (1974), and One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). Unfortunately, the high point of the decade also turned out to be its turning point. Just over two months after The Godfather Part II and Chinatown cleaned up at the 1975 Oscars, Jaws (1975), the original blockbuster movie (so-called because it created queues around city blocks to see it), was released, and the cinematic landscape changed forever, and even more so after Star Wars (1977).

Ever since Jaws and Star Wars, an avalanche of mostly inferior monster movies and sci-films have been released in their wake, films that are mainly “stories of device, convention or contrivance.” These films might even be called inhuman stories or, at the very least, stories in which humans, or human-like species in space, face distinctly inhuman antagonists, ranging from killer sharks to half-cyborg Death Lords. 

In effect, these films approximate “movie life” (especially in size, spectacle, and sensation) far more than the “real life” movies of the ’70s, in which the biggest, deadliest opponents that humans faced were almost exclusively other humans.

Behind the scenes of ‘Jaws’ (1971)

Alexander Payne’s Filmmaking Career: A 1970s in Miniature

In promoting The Holdovers, Payne may have addressed the similarity between the film and 1970s cinema, but, in truth, his entire career can be regarded as the ’70s in miniature. His finest films, and The Holdovers, are all ’70s-style films to some degree or other, prioritizing “very human stories” rather than “device, contrivance, and convention,” emphasizing “real life” rather than “movie life.” 

Indeed, the career-capping success of The Holdovers makes it clear that contrary to popular belief and even cinematic convention, the greatest living American film director in the 21st century is Alexander Payne, not Martin Scorsese.

In particular, the four films that Payne made between 2002 and 2013—About Schmidt (2002), Sideways (2004), The Descendants (2011), and Nebraska (2013)—can now be seen not only as the finest collection of films by an American (indeed, English-language) director in the 21st century but as being worthy of comparison to the finest “imperial phases” in film history, such as Jean Renoir’s 1930s or Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950s. Perhaps only the fact that all of Payne’s masterpieces are so deliberately small, seemingly unimportant, and, above all, understated has denied them universal acclaim.

‘Nebraska’ (2013)

There is another similarity between actual 1970s movies and Payne’s 1970s-style movies. The ’70s marked “the end of American innocence,” signaling the first decade since World War II in which economic, cultural, and artistic improvement could no longer be assumed.

Vietnam (which had begun in the 1960s and dragged on bloodily into the 1970s), Watergate, and the OPEC oil crisis all damaged the old American assumption of hegemony. That feeling only increased as the decade progressed, particularly as it approached 1976, the Bicentennial of America’s Declaration of Independence. Aged 200 years old, America could no longer easily conceive itself as the bright, new, young thing among nations. Now, it has a history.

In Payne’s best films, the sense of America aging and not aging well (and certainly not acquiring much wisdom in the process) is palpable. Indeed, almost all his protagonists are old or aging men who represent an increasingly old and aging America. 

More than any other American director since the ’70s, Payne has shown America as an aging, even decrepit society through a succession of aging, even decrepit men who struggle with everything or at least everything temporally. That process reaches its logical conclusion in The Holdovers.

‘The Holdovers’ (2023)

The Holdovers: A Sorta-Sequel to Sideways

Even amid Payne’s fantastic foursome of the noughties and early 2010s, Sideways is the first among equals, a masterpiece about a man experiencing a real midlife crisis, but much funnier and sweeter than that bald outline suggests. And it is undeniable that a major factor in the success of The Holdovers is that it is a sorta-sequel to Sideways.

Nearly 20 years have passed between the making of Sideways and The Holdovers, as if Payne was waiting for Paul Giamatti to grow old enough to play another Paul, namely Paul Hunham, the main protagonist in The Holdovers. As in Sideways, Giamatti plays a teacher in The Holdovers, the go-to profession for aspiring writers, but the difference between the two roles is profound. 

In Sideways, Giamatti’s character, Miles, is still young enough to entertain the idea of a better future, even if it seems somewhat far-fetched. But in The Holdovers, Giamatti is a classics teacher who is too old to be much use to anyone, including himself. If not exactly waiting to die, he has certainly abandoned any intention of really living.

Above all, it is the ending of The Holdovers, which I will return to, that sets it apart from Sideways. The ending of Sideways, in which Miles has a chance of happiness with the woman he had met at a bachelor party, always felt a little tagged onto such a sour, sombre film; if not quite as bad as the entirely studio-created ending of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), it still grated a little. The ending of The Holdovers does not grate at all, but instead is in keeping with the almost uplifting downbeatness of the whole film. And that’s what makes it great, rather than grating.

‘Sideways’ (2004)

The Writing, the Directing, and the Acting of The Holdovers

Before examining that extraordinary ending of the film, it is necessary to consider all that precedes it.

Payne is a writer-director who has won two Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay for Sideways, adapted from a then-unpublished novel of the same name by Rex Pickett, and The Descendants, adapted from a novel of the same name by Kaui Hart Hemmings. 

However, The Holdovers was written by David Hemingson, proving that Payne is as adept at filming other people’s scripts as his own.

When I first saw The Holdovers, I thought that it must be based on a novel, so simultaneously dense and deft was its story, but it is an original screenplay from a first-time feature film screenwriter. 

Read More: First Time’s The Charm: The Greatest Screenwriting Debuts

What was most important for Hemingson in writing The Holdovers was his childhood, which was largely spent in a boarding school of the type portrayed in the film. Moreover, the fact that he only wrote such a poignant, beautifully realized script when he was nearly 60 years old may account for its brilliantly balanced portrayal of characters at very different points in the age range.

There is only one actual “holdover” in the film, the name given to the boys who remain at school over Christmas. That is Angus Tully, played by Dominic Sessa, a typically angsty teen stuck at school when his mother takes a delayed honeymoon with her new husband. Paul finds himself stuck with chaperone duty. His only help comes from Mary Lamb, the school’s African-American head chef (played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph). Mary, too, faces a solitary holiday season. Her son, Curtis, died in Vietnam just a few months ago

It is this unlikely trio and their even more unlikely activities over the Christmas holidays that form the supposed plot of The Holdovers. But in reality, it is often the purely joyous (for the audience, if not for the characters themselves) exchanges between these three completely different characters that make up the bulk of the film.

‘The Holdovers’ (2023)

The directing and the cinematography by Eigil Bryld are also wondrous. Payne’s focus is on the “very human stories”  of three people just trying to survive Christmas rather than incorporating any flashy or distracting camera movement. Bryll achieves this brilliance by actively recreating the color palette of ’70s cinema. Instead of vibrant hues, he uses muted greys, browns, and blues, bathing the world in a khaki haze or gauze, mimicking the look of ’70s films.

However, it is ultimately the writing that transcends everything else in The Holdovers. Hemingson’s sublime script achieves the magnificence of the greatest ’70s movies, perhaps especially Harold and Maude, another coming-of-the-ages masterpiece. Fittingly, that greatness starts with the title. 

The Holdovers refers to the boys (and perhaps even adults) left behind when others go away but metaphorically refers to the excess baggage we carry throughout life: secrets, regrets, and unrealized ambitions. Slowly, beautifully, and with minimal fuss, Hemingson shows us that, to some extent, we are all holdovers, holding things over from the past that we have to deal with before we can go on living again.

‘The Holdovers’ (2023)

And Finally, That Ending

There is a myth, believed and beloved by too many in the film industry, that audiences want happy endings. However, many of the greatest and most adored films ever made have unhappy endings.

Even more than a happy ending, what an audience (or those who really engage with films rather than just mindlessly watching them) wants is a truthful ending, one in keeping with what has gone before. 

Consequently, the ending of The Holdovers is as surprising as it is disorientating, but is as truthful as everything that precedes it. Indeed, it is the only possible ending for such a magisterial film. A morally ambiguous ending to a morally ambiguous film? Well, what could be more ’70s than that?

Read More: The Descendants: Payne’s Most Complete Film