The Holdovers (2023)
Three loners try to shake off the Christmas blues in a wintry 1970 New England
Angus, Mary and Paul struggle through holidays that seem to promise more sorrow than joy
The Holdovers (2023)
In theaters
The Holdovers tosses you into its deep pool of “empathy” and says: Swim! It’s a moist, melancholy portrait of outsiders at Barton Academy, a New England boys’ prep school, at the close of December 1970. Twelve days bedecked with snow, before and after Christmas.
The director, Alexander Payne, and screenwriter, David Hemingson, make sure we know exactly where we are and what we’re meant to feel. Eigil Bryld’s crisp cinematography blends seasonal beauty with a whisper of distress. Happy holidays? Maybe not.
The production designers and costumers have done rigorous homework, nicely filling in textures from more than 50 years ago.
The chunky, spartan dorm and classroom furniture is hideous. The teenaged boys trudge to class squirming in ill-fitting, not exactly warm coats. Their sport jackets, blazers and Establishment neckties are dismally inelegant.
Many wear the long hair they could get away with in that era even in a starchy institution. They sneak puffs of pot, hide porn magazines in the pages of their textbooks, physically smack and verbally torment one another with gleeful, late adolescent sadism.
Barton (founded in 1797), with its vaulting gothic architecture, looks every bit the imposing, pricey seat of learning that provides a pipeline for wealthy kids to the Ivy League. They’re students for the moment but chiefly they’re impatient, snotty future capitalists.
It’s no surprise, then, that 20 or so of them are monumentally bored in the ancient history class taught by Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a dyspeptic academic stickler who presses upon his students the urgency of the Peloponnesian War and the stoical lessons of Marcus Aurelius.
Most are sneeringly uninterested, so he mocks and ridicules them, heartily passing out grades below C- to nearly all of them. They loathe him as a stuffy bookish tyrant – which he is – so the contempt is mutual.
Imagine Paul’s horror when he learns he’s been assigned to shepherd the school’s “holdovers” during the holidays. These are boys who for reasons of distance, geographic or familial, can’t go home during the break.
At first there are five abandoned ones, but when the wealthy father of one of them helicopters four of them, with their parents’ permission, to the New England ski slopes, only one is left.
That’s Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa, in his movie debut), whose mother and brand-new stepfather ask him to remain at school over the holidays while they honeymoon and solidify their recent marriage.
Which confines the forlorn Angus to the campus and environs. As it happens, the school’s head cook, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), has no Christmas plans, so the three joyless celebrants share meals and doldrums.
The widowed Mary has recently lost her only child, a son, in Vietnam. He was a Barton boy, too, but Mary couldn’t raise the money to send him on to college, so he enlisted, and lost his life serving his country.
Mary and Paul doing their best to coax Angus into a tiny circle of Christmas cheer
That’s the trio of unfortunates we watch slog through the year’s end. Payne and Hemingson ensnare us, too, with presumptions.
We’re to believe that Paul has been unhappily teaching a subject he loves to gangs of ungrateful students for more than three decades. Unpublished, unrecognized as a scholar, he’s had no other life than his exhausting “career” hounding boys to ponder events and ideas thousands of years old.
No personal relationships, parents long departed, travels to ancient lands only dreamt of, the other sex, since his young manhood, kept at a frosty distance. All this contrived disappointment doesn’t actually explain Paul’s anger, which he’s distilled into an almost instinctive unkindness to young people.
Is he merely a Grinch, or an even more malign Ebenezer Scrooge?
Ah, says the screenplay, let’s give him a test. That would be Angus, who is the only boy in the class to score a B+ on his end-of-semester exam. But Angus, who “gets” the subject matter, or at least can fake interest in it, suffers at a remove that Paul can’t reach.
Over the holidays Paul is a caregiver to his young charges, but in three decades of teaching he seems to have developed zero compassion. It strikes me that someone this heartless, who also systematically awards low grades to sons of the wealthy and powerful, is an unconvincingly dumb professional.
He bedevils his students because he doesn’t know how not to. He can’t loosen their hold on him, we come to realize, but the script never lets him admit as much. The empty man has hollowed himself out. Are Payne and Hemingson mocking Paul or rooting for him? Nearly ’til the end, I wasn’t entirely sure.
Mary’s bereavement for her son and his lost possibilities isn’t on the same order as Paul and Angus’ distress, keen as that is.
Black soldiers like Mary’s son died in inordinately high numbers in Vietnam. For Payne to milk that glaring, still not fully chronicled, historical injustice for cheap tears and handy empathy is insulting.
So, Angus’ contempt for this uncaring teacher seems justified. What a cruel “educator”.
Ah, says the screenplay, let’s give Angus a buried secret. Sure, he wanted a break from school, to at least be near his mother during the holidays. And we can see how he’d be not just peeved but hurt to be cast aside just because he has a new stepfather.
But the couple’s leaving him at school feels like one more plot device, so our sympathy for Angus takes a long while to run deep. It’s also a cover for his depression, which we only begin to get to the bottom of late in the story.
Ah, says the screenplay, let’s give these two flailing men a ballast, a woman who can see into their agitated hearts. And let’s fill her with insight because she’s weighed down by an endless sadness.
Mary lost her son (whose father died soon after the infant was conceived) before he reached age 20. So, for Mary, her sole offspring’s lost hopes are hurtfully matched against Angus’ writhing and twisting.
’Tis the season to celebrate what you have with whoever you’re lucky enough to have around
Mary, who shares the meals she cooks for the two outcasts, patiently listens to them. And we see that her grief hasn’t faded and isn’t about to.
I couldn’t help recalling Faulkner’s encomium to Black resilience in Go Down, Moses: “The Negroes, they endured.”
Bull. They endured him and his, which Faulkner never got around to owning up to in so many words in his labyrinthine novels and stories about a doomed American South.
Mary, not unlike the Black cook Dilsey in Faulkner, feels like a plant, an open wound of pain invoked to beatify — consider her name — the anguish of Paul and Angus. Just when it seems the rest of the world — consider the holiday’s namesake — has washed its hands of them.
How disrespectful to actual broken, grieving mothers with quite enough to do trying to console themselves. Mary’s bereavement for her son and his lost possibilities isn’t of the same order as Paul and Angus’ distress, keen as that is.
Black soldiers like Mary’s son died in inordinately high numbers in Vietnam. For Payne to milk that glaring, still not fully chronicled, historical injustice for cheap tears and cushy empathy is insulting.
All the script’s strained compassion aside, Giamatti by the end manages to make Paul’s sadness credible. Why has Paul isolated himself? His circumstances don’t require it. But what we eventually learn of Paul’s short-circuited career does feel scary and credible.
He seems petty but he’s a bigger man than might have been expected, and Giamatti lends him a fragile, hard-won dignity.
Randolph gives a sensitive, deliberately spare performance. Her inspiration doesn’t seem to come from the director’s instructions. It looks as if we’re seeing the lessons of the actress’ personal experience on her face. I’m not suggesting that she didn’t take Payne’s direction. I could be wrong, but I sense that she didn’t much rely on it.
The intelligence and sensitivity in Randolph’s eyes convey Mary’s perceptions, not the distraught maternal homilies sprinkled through the script. She’s given words to show us that she sees through Paul’s and Angus’ distaste for one another.
But Randolph’s steady, non-judging gaze conveys more empathy than the uninspired speeches the scriptwriter has given to Mary.
This is an impressive debut for Sessa. He shows a promising openness to the camera and a sense of how to keep his body agile in front of it. But so far – and this isn’t a fault – his acting lacks a sense of discovery, of making us wonder as we watch what he might say or do in the very next second.
He could gain that edge in time. He’s given some scenes late in the story that are exploitatively written, but he manages to squeeze genuine pathos out of them.
Some will say this movie is simple heartwarming melodrama, and we can just relax and bask in its tender mercies.
I can’t go along with that. Lonely teachers, anguished students and struggling Black mothers deserve more sincere recognition than this script musters. I say, let’s hold on for braver writing that digs deeper than the funny/sad “suffering” that’s being sold here.