‘The Holdovers’ Special Screening: ’70s Somerville on the Silver Screen

“This theater occupies a very special place in my heart,” said director Alexander Payne to a packed Somerville Theater Monday night on Oct. 30. It was a no-brainer that “The Holdovers” — a pastiche of ’70s cinema in both style and story — be christened on glorious 35-millimeter film in front of an audience made largely of the New England crew who helped make it — and in the same theater featured in one of the movie’s pivotal scenes no less.

Partnering with the Boston Independent Film Festival (BIFF), Ian Judge, Chief of Operations at Somerville Theater, gladly welcomed Payne and his crew. “It’s a really special moment for us, and to host this is equally special, if not more,” Judge said.

Not only did the iconic theater serve as a set within the movie and location for its 35-millimeter premiere, but it also showed classic seventies films like “Paper Moon,” “The Landlord,” “All the President’s Men,” “Harold and Maude,” and “Last Detail” to Payne’s cast and crew as a primer before production on “The Holdovers” began.

After releasing “Downsizing” in 2017, Payne had “flirted for a moment with ‘The Menu’” along with “The Burial” and another unnamed project that was dropped only five days before production. Ultimately, though, he landed on directing “The Holdovers.”

In the Q&A session following the screening, Payne commented on how this latest movie fits into his legacy as a director.

“The directors I admire all have an alter ego,” Payne said. “If I worked more often mine would be Paul Giamatti.”

“The Holdovers” is Payne’s first movie in over six years and his first collaboration with Giamatti since 2004’s critically acclaimed “Sideways,” yet it seems like their creative fire is still burning as white hot as it did almost two decades ago. In “The Holdovers,” Giamatti plays Paul Hunham, an Ancient Civilizations professor at the prestigious Barton Academy. Like ancient gum stuck to a dormitory desk, Hunham is a natural and unwelcome fixture of the school. He is universally despised by students and faculty alike, and he is given the undesirable role as caretaker of the school’s “holdovers” — students who do not return home to their families — over winter break.

This concept alone is a recipe for success — and indeed is the concept that Payne handed over to screenwriter David Hemingson half a decade and a pandemic ago. Payne met Hemingson after he wrote a screenplay containing the seeds for what would become “The Holdovers” — which had been on Payne’s backburner for more than seven years. Hemingson would go on to add crucial characters and plot threads, including Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Mary Lamb. According to Payne, he and Hemingson hit it off so well that they are currently collaborating on a Western period piece.

After building a screenplay “satisfactorily personal to both of us,” Payne and his team assembled a “super Boston crew” to bring the movie to life. Massachusetts in particular lent itself to a low-budget period piece given that it has remained relatively architecturally stagnant since the ’70s and recently legislated healthy film tax credits.

Whether it was for convenience or not, New England winds up being the perfect location for Payne’s tear-jerking dramedy to unfold. Be it Somerville Theater or the Sheraton Commander, every location authentically captures vintage America.

Payne said, “We didn’t want it to feel like a period movie. We wanted it to feel like a contemporary movie made in 1970.”

Old-school graphics, including the MPAA rating, Focus Features and Miramax logos, and title card itself, immediately transport the audience a half century into the past. From there, period lenses, static dissolves, folk rock, mono sound, “grain, gate weave, softened lines,” and everything in between make the movie a ’70s movie — not only in its story, but in its construction.

Ty Burr, moderator of the Q & A and former film critic for the Boston Globe, recounted a conversation with the movie’s set dresser.

“He and the people he worked with went and found candy boxes from 1970 to put in the lobby, which you see for one tenth of a second,” Burr said.

Behind extreme attention to detail on the technical and production side of things, however, is also a story with a whopping heart — or three hearts, to be exact. New England newcomer Dominic Sessa and “Dolemite is My Name” darling Da’Vine Joy Randolph brilliantly star alongside Giamatti. Sessa plays a neglected child with loads of family trauma and Randolph a grief-ridden cook who has recently lost her child to Vietnam. Each character has their own troubled history to contend with, and from start to finish those histories are never sidestepped and always enriched.

If “The Holdovers” is about building community and confronting trauma, it is also about the intersection of those concepts with privilege. Payne went to Stanford, and both Hemingson and Giammatti hail from Yale. Even moderator Ty Burr is a Dartmouth graduate (as is Payne’s father). All this to say, “The Holdovers” feels like its creators are grappling with their own histories. In fact, Payne even recalls Giamatti’s first reaction to Hunham as, “I knew this guy.”

Randolph’s character, Mary Lamb, exists outside this privileged world despite working within it day in and day out. Her son dreamed of going to college under the GI Bill but was killed in action in Vietnam. This is the world that “The Holdovers” embodies — as relevant today as it was in 1970. The movie’s best scenes are when the invisible walls of privilege are shattered, and characters come together to support each other independent of tax bracket or college degree or ability to recite lines from Aurelius’ “Meditations.” As Hunham puts it, not just anyone is “entitled” to his story, so it means all the more when he or any of the movie’s key players opens themselves up to each other.

On top of all of this, “The Holdovers” is also a Christmas movie. Its best scene befittingly takes place at a Christmas party, during which the three characters are separated and undergo their own personal love journeys. Each ends differently — one sad, one bittersweet, and one left wide open even after the credits roll much later on. After an incident, the three characters leave the party together — without their love interests — and it is here that an unlikely family of misfits really begins to materialize.

This family is tested again and again as the curtain is drawn further and further back. As the family becomes closer, these battles — internal and external, intrapersonal and interpersonal — feel a lot closer to home. As the characters make themselves vulnerable, so must the audience.

One of the movie’s most memorable gut punches — when the curtain rapidly draws back and betrayal looms large — takes place at the Somerville Theater inside the movie. Outside the movie but inside the very same theater, the audience could not help but applaud and relish the unique intimacy.

This intimacy was present the entire event — in the movie, in the theater, and in the people. This is a movie and theater steeped in history, and a good chunk of the people there had a lasting role to play in that history. They laughed moments before big punchlines, applauded in pockets as they recognized family members and friends, took out their phones to capture their name rolling in the credits. To be there was to be welcomed into their story — to be part of a family of misfits brought together under the power of New England cinema.