Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Holdovers
2023 · Alexander Payne · The Holdovers on Sightlines
The movie starts by lying to you. A studio logo comes up in the wrong vintage, and then the image itself arrives with grain in it and a faint sideways shimmer, the wobble an old print gets when the sprockets don't quite hold. Gate weave. Eigil Bryld put it there on purpose. For a moment you can't place the year, and Alexander Payne would like to keep it that way as long as he can.
What the lie is covering: a New England boarding school at Christmas 1970, emptied of nearly everyone. A classics teacher the boys despise. A few students nobody came to collect. And the cafeteria manager, Mary, whose son has just been killed in Vietnam.
A word from Deleuze here, because he gives you a way to see why so small a film sits so heavily.
He sorted cinema into two families. In the first, the movement-image, a person takes in a situation and what they see comes back out of them as action that changes it. Problem, response, new situation. That circuit runs almost every movie you have ever loved. Then, he argued, it broke, and it broke in the world before it broke on screen: postwar Italy, rubble, people who could see everything that was wrong and act on none of it. Films filled up with characters who mostly watched. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image.
Payne's version of the crisis is a building with the heat turned down.
Take the three of them and ask what act is actually available. Mary's son is dead. There is no action anywhere in the world that addresses that, and the film never sends her looking for one. Hunham loathes the school and the school employs him; that isn't a problem, it's the water. The boy can't fix whatever it is at home that left him standing there on the last day of term. Nobody in this movie gets to act on the thing that is actually hurting them. What they get instead is time, a room, and each other.
Deleuze had a name for a character once acting is off the table. The seer: the one who watches and endures. And a name for what fills the screen then, pure optical and sound situations, where looking is all that is left. Da'Vine Joy Randolph's performance is the cleanest case in the picture, and it is why she won for it. The dossier says she carries the film's deepest grief with almost offhand dignity, and offhand is the technical accomplishment. Grief with nowhere to discharge doesn't get a scene. It gets a woman doing inventory.
This is where Payne's Ashby inheritance stops being homage and starts being method. From Being There he takes deadpan melancholy sustained through patient long takes instead of joke-cutting, and that choice is structural. A joke cut is an action-image joke: setup, snip, payoff, situation resolved. Payne won't snip. He leaves the joke and the hurt inside the same take and lets you sit with both, which is what the dossier means when it says he trusts that comedy and sorrow share a border. Deleuze called these unhurried stretches dead time, the everyday simply held. A school on break is nothing but dead time. Payne shoots a two-week hole in the calendar and finds the movie in it.
The campus helps him. A school with no students is no longer a setting for anything; it's corridors and a dining hall and snow, space that has lost its job. Deleuze's term for that is the any-space-whatever, a place that has stopped organizing action and now only carries feeling. Payne borrows the texture straight from The Last Picture Show, whose near-monochrome austerity and elegiac small-town loneliness are the model for the made-in-1970 surface here.
The bodies carry the rest. Deleuze wrote about a cinema in which a posture suddenly exposes the whole social arrangement it sits inside; he called it the gest. Hunham's is the Latin invective. A man too poor and too stuck to leave insults rich children in a dead language, from inside an institution built to move those children upward, and the weapon he reaches for is the one thing the institution has no use for. Mary's is a tray. She feeds boys her son's age who are being routed somewhere he was not.
Giamatti's whole instrument is postural. Wall-eyed, stiff, the armor coming off one plate at a time, which is the dossier's phrase and exactly right; the information is in the body's slow concessions, not in dialogue. And watch how Payne arrives at faces. He zooms. The reframing zoom is his debt to Five Easy Pieces, and it does something a cut cannot. A cut to a close-up announces that feeling has arrived. A zoom admits it, drifting in as though the camera got interested a second late. Deleuze's affection-image is a feeling registered on a face and not yet spent on any action. That is every close-up in this film, and Payne reaches each one by creeping.
Which returns us to the counterfeit we started with. Film theory's oldest contract, Bazin's, is that the photographic image bears a physical trace of what actually stood before the lens. Films don't lie about their own occasion. The Holdovers forges its provenance: the grain, the weave, the logos, the dissolves belong to a stock and a projector that never touched this footage. Deleuze's powers of the false is the idea that falsity can be productive rather than deceptive, a way of making something true that a true surface would miss. The dossier gets this in one line: the pastiche serves feeling rather than nostalgia. A sharp digital 2023 image of 1970 would have been a costume drama, and you would have watched it from outside, fondly. The forged print puts you inside the year with no distance to be fond from.
The lineage is unusual because Payne isn't descended from these films so much as living in them. The reluctant-chaperone structure and the loose humanist two-shot blocking come from The Last Detail. The folk-singer needle-drop as emotional scoring comes from Harold and Maude, copied down to using Cat Stevens' 'The Wind.' The sour adult and the sharp kid, staged as period Americana, is Paper Moon. Every one of those is 1970 to 1973. He didn't take influences from the era; he moved in.
What it did was prove something the industry had stopped believing. In an American cinema starved of mid-budget character drama, it landed like a care package, and its descendants are still arriving, so the ledger isn't closed. But the technique is now on the table for anyone: you can build a film as an artifact of the period it depicts and use the fake surface as an emotional instrument rather than a gag.
Watch it again and watch two things. Watch what the film refuses to let anyone solve, and then notice what it hands them instead. And watch the zooms. They are the film telling you, very quietly, that it got interested in somebody just now, and that it isn't going to cut away.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — The premise itself: a grieving cook whose son is dead, a teacher trapped in the institution he despises, and a boy nobody collected, none of whom can act on what actually hurts them. The film's facets are a list of unfixables: grief and loss, mental illness, addiction, Vietnam.
- the seer (voyant) — Da'Vine Joy Randolph's Mary, carrying the film's deepest grief with almost offhand dignity: a watcher and endurer with no available act, grief that gets inventory rather than a scene.
- pure optical and sound situations — The snowbound chamber-piece structure, where the cast's only remaining activity over the break is looking, listening and waiting out the days.
- dead time (temps mort) — The Being There debt named in the lineage: deadpan comic melancholy sustained through patient, unhurried long takes rather than joke-cutting, applied to a two-week hole in the school calendar.
- any-space-whatever — The emptied campus and its snow, shot with the near-monochrome austerity and elegiac loneliness borrowed from The Last Picture Show: a school that has stopped functioning as a setting for action.
- the gest — Giamatti's Hunham, fluent in Latin invective, insulting rich boys in a dead language from inside the institution that will promote them; and Mary feeding boys her son's age at the school where she works.
- cinema of the body (attitudes and postures) — Giamatti wall-eyed and stiff, playing a curmudgeon whose armor the film removes one plate at a time, so the film's information sits in postural concession rather than dialogue.
- affection-image — Payne's Five Easy Pieces inheritance of naturalistic reframing zooms: he drifts into faces by slow zoom rather than cutting to close-up, registering feeling that is never discharged into action.
- powers of the false — Bryld's added period grain and gate weave, the vintage studio logos, the dissolves and slow zooms of Ashby's era: a forged provenance that, per the dossier, serves feeling rather than nostalgia.