The Holdovers

➤Rated R
➤Peacock
➤S5 / V3 / L8*

Director Alexander Payne brings his audience back to 1970 to celebrate a dysfunctional Christmas with The Holdovers, a film garnering much praise this awards season.

Paul Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, an eccentric academic at Barton Academy, an elite boys’ boarding school in New England. Hunham teaches ancient civilizations, and he doesn’t have much patience for his pupils who suffer from an overweening sense of entitlement and who fail to see the ­contemporary relevance of the fifth-century Peloponnesian War. The boys, for their part, hate him as he cheerfully torments them with the likes of Pericles and Demosthenes.

But it’s not just the students who dislike Mr. Hunham. His colleagues don’t care for his pomposity either, and he ends up getting the jobs no one else wants to do. Consequently, it falls to Mr. Hunham to babysit the boys who have nowhere to go for Christmas break. It’s only reasonable since he doesn’t have a family who needs him.

But Mr. Hunham won’t be in charge of the boys all alone. Also staying behind at Barton is the cook, Mary Lamb, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph. She doesn’t mind working through Christmas since her only son recently died in the Vietnam War. She has nothing to celebrate this holiday season.

Among those holding over at Barton is Angus, played by Dominic Sessa. He’s a bright yet troubled boy, trying to make sense of a life that even at this young age has been filled with disappointment. During this less than ideal Christmas season, a kinship forms among the trio, and they help each other cope with their losses and dashed dreams.

Part of the charm of The Holdovers lies in Payne’s ability to transport viewers back to 1970 without relying on cheap nostalgia. The movie possesses a sincerity of time and place without resorting to ­endless references to pop culture. The look and feel, right down to the title cards, hearken back to the days when cinema dealt more with human relationships than superpowers and explosions.

The film is very funny with a razor-sharp script that eventually takes the trio beyond the walls of Barton Academy. But despite the comedy, a bittersweet melancholy hangs over this film. We feel for these three characters. And in spite of their personal foibles, they aren’t objects of mockery. They aren’t really objects of pity either. Their interactions reveal complex personalities tossed about by the world.

Giamatti gives an incredible ­performance as the curmudgeonly teacher of ancient wisdom. It would have been so easy to play this character as a type, but he portrays Mr. Hunham as a many-layered man who is slow to understand the world around him. At turns, he’s acerbic, blustering, insecure, and tender. Randolph’s Mary Lamb manages to project a demeanor that’s both no-nonsense and motherly, and Sessa, who’s acting in his first role, brings a fierceness to Angus as he longs for more innocent days. All three characters are very sad.

With these powerful, nuanced performances and the film’s poignant script, it’s a shame that the film includes objectionable material, because it could have become a ­family Christmas classic. Instead, The Holdovers is rated R, mainly for foul language, most of which feels authentic yet unnecessary. There’s also a scene in which a boy looks at an adult magazine, and the audience gets a brief glimpse of nudity on the page. Even these elements hew closely to the film’s goal of re-creating 1970, the year when strong profanity started creeping into Hollywood movies, and studios began pushing the boundaries of good taste.

The Holdovers will be one of the main contenders this awards season, which isn’t a bad thing because the film is much more accessible for the average audience than much of what Hollywood promotes as great cinema. Giamatti and Randolph have both won a Golden Globe and a Critics Choice Award for their roles, and Sessa won a Critics Choice Award for best young actor.

*Ratings from kids-in-mind.com, with quantity of sexual (S), violent (V), and foul-language (L) content on a 0-10 scale, with 10 high