It’s a tough year to crack the Best Supporting Actor category at the Oscars. Populated by the likes of Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer), Robert De Niro (Killers of the Flower Moon) and Mark Ruffalo (Poor Things), you could argue it’s hard to make a case for a debutant like Dominic Sessa.
Yet here’s an actor who holds his own next to stellar performances by Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph (who have been nominated for the Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress Oscars respectively), breathing life into his character and establishing himself as a talent to watch out for. Set in New England in the Seventies, Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is about the unlikely but ultimately heart-warming connection that forms between three very lonely people who find themselves spending Christmas and the end of the year at an empty boarding school. The 21-year-old Sessa plays Angus Tully, a student who feels abandoned by his family and finds companionship with Barton Academy’s most hated teacher, Paul Hunham (Giamatti), and the kindly head cook, Mary Lamb (Randolph).
At the beginning of the film, Angus is a sullen, Holden Caulfield-esque teenager, full of smart-aleck retorts (“I resent that baseless accusation,” he says when another student blames him for a pack of stolen cigarettes) and defiance for authority (he questions if Hunham should really be starting a new chapter right before winter break: “Honestly, it’s a little absurd… Sir.”). With flinty eyes and angular features set in a permanent scowl, Sessa leaves us in no doubt of Angus’s exasperation and frustration with the world around him. Yet he also brings an aching vulnerability to his performance, unfolding what Angus keeps hidden slowly and thoughtfully.
We learn that Angus has been kicked out of three schools, and if he doesn’t stick it out at Barton, he will be shipped off to a military academy. It’s evident that the reason he’s changed schools is his prickliness, rather than his credentials as a student. Angus is bright — even a demanding stickler like Hunham gives Angus a B+ — but he is also troubled, often mouthing off and getting into fights with other students.