Let Me Sleep In the Stillness of the Morning

“The Holdovers really hit white dudes in their late teens and 20s like crack hit low income neighborhoods in the 80s”

- twitter user Jared (@name3309)

I’m so elated that this is the article I get write for our long-awaited holiday special. It’s such an incredible feeling when something you spend so long being excited for not only meets your lofty expectations but blows them so far out of the water that looking back it’s impossible to imagine your sights having been set anywhere other than the sun rising over the Barton Academy rooftops. 

When I tell you I had insanely high hopes for Alexander Payne’s new film The Holdovers, I cannot stress enough how immense the gap is between the ceiling of my expectations and the somehow-loftier floor of what he actually managed to deliver. And what’s more, I somehow didn’t realize it was going to be a Christmas movie.

The Holdovers’ relatively trodden plot follows Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and newcomer Dominic Sessa’s haphazard trio of melancholy New Englanders each sitting at different points in the rigid orbital path of Barton Academy. One is a world-weary hermit wasting away his days in a charmingly cluttered faculty housing unit, perfecting the art of inflicting the same maximum pain on his rich, entitled students that he learned from his own Barton mentors. One is a grieving mother who just can’t bring herself to leave the last place she and her son were able to be together, despite constant reminders of his absence and bitter racism from the little shits she spends day after day making sure are well fed. And the other is the perfect middle ground between the two, his own brand of certified Barton Little Shit but steeped in all the pathos of early Linklater protagonist and treated by Payne with more care and empathy than any other depiction of this particular brand of youthfulness has ever been allowed.

It’s steeped in winter warmth and cynical bitterness and the inexorable head-butting and little blink-and-you’ll-miss-it squabbles and reconciliations of the holidays, and David Hemingson’s incredible script tackles those deeply specific feelings in a way that finally recaptures what all those nostalgic holiday movies we all grew up with managed to capture, and what every shoddy Netflix imitation has been sorely missing — authenticity isn’t the right word, but it’s in the ballpark. It’s a hard word to put my finger on. Bitterness, cynicism, empathy, passion, love, timelessness, patience. An understanding that the magic of the holidays sometimes, paradoxically, comes from how fucked up they can be.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about production design. Because dog, this movie doesn’t just feel like an intricate, loving homage to the 1970s, I swear to God, they just shot this in ’73 and kept the film stock on ice for fifty years. The costumes, sound, music, everything from the opening logos to the patience of the editing is so achingly reminiscent of a lost yet insularly legendary era of filmmaking that sitting in the theater both times I saw it genuinely made me feel like I was watching something like Harold and Maude or American Graffiti during their original theatrical runs. It’s genuinely the most impressive example of completely holistic production design I think I’ve ever seen. The amount of care and passion for recreating an era Payne and his production team poured into this was truly the final ingredient this already perfect script needed. The sound is even mixed in mono, and has this achingly warm quality to it that made me want to rewatch it on VHS on an old tube television tucked into a buckling oak cabinet, with a fire crackling in the background and a blizzard forming in the yard.

And Wendy Chuck's costumes — the coffee-colored corduroy suits, the violet wool cardigans, the prickly bookish sweaters tucked over tight-fitting button-downs — complement the on-location New England prep school setting and the bodies that inhabit it so unbelievably well that it’s genuinely hard to imagine the cast didn’t just pull from their own wardrobes. It’s so good that you genuinely don’t think twice about Damien Jurado’s 2014 “Silver Joy” soundtracking the opening scene, because Jurado is just as good at hearkening back to a lost era as Payne. “Let me sleep in the stillness of the morning,” he croons, as Eigil Bryld’s camera sweeps across Barton’s snow-capped rooftops and ornate New England architecture — I’m not kidding when I say every single minute detail of this production works equally in service of the script and the vibe. Every single one.

My favorite example is the opening Focus Features and Miramax logos. Payne’s frequent graphic design collaborator Nate Carlson created brand new animations for the two production houses from scratch, drawing on decades of history and researching the evolution of studio opening logos throughout the history of film, culminating in a pair of the most delightfully simple and period appropriate brief opening animations I’ve ever seen. All whites are dulled to a warm cream tone, and everything is presented in blocky, beautiful primary colors, complete with subtle vintage projector jitter and a heaping of film grain for good measure. The animation on the type itself is clean and simple, and as a graphic designer myself I was literally grinning ear to ear before the opening shot even rolled.

This is the type of film people are going to be watching, loving, discovering, and sharing with one another for years. As my partner Quinn said after our first viewing, it’s the truest example of the phrase “instant classic” I think I’ve ever been lucky enough to see in a theater. It’s also Paul Giamatti’s best performance. Same with Da’Vine Joy Randolph. And despite never having acted in anything before, new discovery Dominic Sessa somehow holds his own perfectly against both of them. They’re the most perfect, most tragic, most loving found family. Please do yourself a favor and see this with your family this season. They’ll love it.