The Holdovers (2023)
dir. Alexander Payne
Rated: R
image: ©2023 Focus Features
Director Alexander Payne’s emotionally rich, quietly moving triumph The Holdovers is a study in the old cliché “before judging someone, walk a mile in their shoes.” Payne harnesses the empathetic powers of the movies – an artform the late, great Roger Ebert once called “an empathy machine” – to deliver a complex and heartfelt character study of three souls each struggling with their own demons and who find a brief solace in each other from the myriad cruelties of the outside world.
On the eve of the winter holiday break in 1970, Barton Academy boarding school students are abandoning ship for time at home or on the ski slopes for a brief family vacation. But, not everyone has somewhere to go – or, more accurately, not everyone is wanted by their respective families.
This year, there are five Barton students given the designation of “holdovers,” meaning that, since they’ve got nowhere else to go, they will celebrate the holidays together alone at the empty prep school. In a further indignity, the heat to the main dormitory has been shut off for the holiday break, so the holdovers must stay in the school’s infirmary during the interregnum.
Since the school can’t leave these kids unsupervised for the two-week break, one of the teachers must stay behind, sacrificing his own holiday celebrations for the wellbeing of his charges. This year, as a punishment, the duty falls to curmudgeonly classics professor Paul Hunham. Ostensibly, Hunham is handed the assignment because the faculty member up next in the rotation has a sick mother who requires his care.
It’s a lie.
Hunham sees through the subterfuge. He knows he pulled holdover duty because he failed a student whose father is a powerful US senator, causing Princeton to rescind its offer of admission to the student. Paul is, to put it mildly, an imperious instructor. The kids all call him “walleye” behind his back because of his strabismus.
Paul doesn’t suffer fools at all, let alone gladly, and peppers his students with highbrow (and high-larious) insults, including calling them “fetid layabouts” and “rancid little philistines.” Apropos to the holiday setting of the movie, Paul Hunham is Ebenezer Scrooge as a private school teacher.
When the parents of one of those left behind change course and come to pick him up – via helicopter, no less – they offer to take all of the young men with them on their ski lodge vacation, as long as their parents grant permission. All get permission except one, the troubled Angus Tully. Angus was left behind because his mother scrapped the usual family holiday in order to honeymoon with her new husband.
Paul desperately tries to get Angus’s mom on the phone – he assures his young charge that it’s as important, if not more so, to Paul that Angus be allowed to leave; Paul has a stack of mystery novels he would prefer to spend the break with – to no avail. The two newlyweds are on an excursion and won’t be back until after Angus’s window for escape has closed. Teacher and student resign themselves to each other’s unwanted company.
Rounding out this motley crew is the school’s cafeteria manager, Mary Lamb. Mary’s son, Curtis, attended Barton. (His mother took the job there solely so her son could get a good education.) Mary is grief-stricken because Curtis was killed the previous year, at 19, after he was drafted to serve in Vietnam. Mary stays on to feed Paul, Angus, and the school’s janitor.
With his feature screenwriting debut, David Hemingson has crafted a trio of emotionally complex characters who we come to know, respect, and love over the course of the film. Prior to his work on The Holdovers – which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay – Hemingson has had a prodigious, 25-year career in television. He’s worked as a writer or producer on numerous TV shows, including the sitcoms Just Shoot Me!, American Dad!, and Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23.
In fact, The Holdovers itself began as a television project. Hemingson had originally been developing what became the screenplay for the film as a pilot for a series. The story is semi-autobiographical, based on experiences Hemingson had while attending a boarding school in Connecticut. Other bits of wisdom and life lessons contained in the film came from advice offered up by Hemingson’s uncle during the writer’s formative years.
The best of these anecdotes from Hemingson’s uncle comes midway through the film, after Angus has convinced Paul to take him on a forbidden “field trip” to Boston during the break. (For liability purposes, Barton prohibits leaving the school grounds and immediate vicinity during this holdover period.)
On the cold, snowy outing, the two are browsing carts of books set outside of a bookstore on the sidewalk. A sex worker strides up to Paul and asks if he has a spare cigarette. Paul looks perplexed, as he’s currently smoking a pipe. Sorry, he tells her. Frustrated at his clueless response, she makes herself clearer: “How about a date, then? You want a date?”
Angus smiles slyly as he tells his teacher to go ahead. See, the sex worker says, “[h]e doesn’t mind if daddy gets a little candy cane.” Paul then responds with the most hilariously dead-pan bon mot of the movie, summing up his entire character in two sentences: “Thank you, but I never really liked candy canes,” he retorts. “Plus, I’m prediabetic.” The particulars of the dialog are likely the product of creative license, but Hemingson has said in interviews that the scene was inspired by a similar scenario he experienced while with his uncle.
Angus chides his teacher for turning down the offer, even surmising that Paul has never had sex. Paul smirks, assuring Angus that, in his youth, Paul participated in escapades the details of which “would curl [Angus’s] toes.”
And that’s one of the pleasures of human interaction that makes The Holdovers shine. We all walk around bumping into each other, never really knowing what lies beneath the surface. When you spend time with people – whether it’s by your choice or not – you learn what makes them tick, why they are the way they are.
Over the course of the film, Paul, Angus, and Mary form a bond. It’s a delicate little family unit in which they can share their true selves, complete with the bitterness, anger, and grief affecting each member. The kind of understanding that we see these characters gain about each other – brought about by confiding conversations that lay bare (often painful) truths about their pasts – gives fresh meaning to Paul’s admonition to his students that studying history is important because the past is an explanation of the present.
The world of The Holdovers is a hermetically sealed one. Payne uses his character study to bring these three isolated and lonely people to vibrant, if melancholic, life. Payne’s magnificent direction, in which he uses zoom lenses evocative of the filmmaking techniques popular during The Holdovers’ early ‘70s setting, sets a quiet, contemplative tone. Cinematographer Eigil Bryld uses earth tones and muted lighting to gorgeous effect. Hemingson’s dialog is understated and loaded with profundity. But the key element that makes the film so emotionally resonant are the performances from its three leads.
Paul Giamatti, as classics teacher Paul Hunham, has never been in finer form or had his professional brand of comedic curmudgeon align so closely to the character he plays – although the case could be made for his performances in American Splendor or Sideways to take that honor. There’s a softy lurking beneath Hunham’s rough, gruff exterior and Giamatti grants us brief flashes of the character’s whole nature at exactly the right moments.
I’ll issue the most cliché, Gene-Shalit-like praise (because it happens to be true) about Da'Vine Joy Randolph’s performance as the grief-stricken Mary: Da’Vine is simply divine in the role. One particular moment stands out in this regard.
In one sequence, Paul, Mary, Angus, and the school’s janitor, Danny, attend a Christmas party being thrown by another Barton employee. Mary, who is a little tipsy, takes charge of the music for the party, and she puts on a song that she and Curtis used to love to listen to together.
We see a wave of emotions on Randolph’s face as Mary listens to the song. We see her smile, ever so slightly, as she remembers the good times with her son. Immediately the grief comes crashing back, once again turning her face into a mask of sorrow. Payne’s camera holds tight on Randolph’s face during this moment. If I have one quibble with The Holdovers, it’s that the movie jettisons Mary for a good third of the picture.
Making his feature film debut as troubled student Angus Tully, Dominic Sessa evinces a wonderful mix of adolescent smart-assery and earnestness.
To reiterate Paul’s admonishment to his students for their lack of enthusiasm for his class, history is an explanation of the present. Alexander Payne, David Hemingson, and everyone else involved with The Holdovers have crafted a look back to our recent past that is moving, funny, and incisive, in no small part thanks to the incredible onscreen talent.
Why it got 4 stars:
- The Holdovers is a wonderful character study full of compassion and heart. A friend made the observation that it could easily become a holiday season tradition kind of movie. I couldn’t agree more.
Things I forgot to mention in my review, because, well, I'm the Forgetful Film Critic:
- Payne brings us into his world from the opening logos. He added an old school R-rating notification and put record pops and skips on the soundtrack to establish the early-’70s vibe. His movie is as close to an approximation of what I imagine that time period was like as Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused. Considering how I feel about that movie, that’s high praise indeed.
- I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the movie’s sound department used equipment that was popular during the ‘70s. It just sounds like a movie from that time period.
- It’s never explicitly mentioned, but Payne and Hemingson are clearly making a statement about privilege by making Curtis, a black student, the only Barton man to have died in Vietnam. The same can be said for the fact that Mary, a black woman, had to take a job at the school in order to get her son accepted.
- Paul Giamatti running (if you can call it that) as Hunham is one of the funniest things captured on film last year.
- The Holdovers has a killer soundtrack, with some deeply satisfying needle drops.
Close encounters with people in movie theaters:
I watched The Holdovers on a FYC screener disc in the home theater. It’s currently available in theaters in wide release and with a Peacock Premium subscription.
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The FFC’s political soapbox
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