The Holdovers really is a holdover to a more human type of film

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

At its most basic, The Holdovers reads like a Hallmark holiday special: an embittered, middle-aged man; a teenaged boy whose loneliness has honed the chip on his shoulder to a razor’s edge; and a mother mourning the loss of her own teenaged son are forced to spend the weeks surrounding the Christmas holiday together. Their various flaws and hurts at first keep them apart, but slowly the walls come down and they form a kind of family of misfits.

That premise could be as hokey as any throwaway piece of holiday wish fulfillment, but The Holdovers is in line for five Oscars in some of the most prestigious categories: Best Picture, Best Actor for Paul Giamatti, Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Best Film Editing and Best Original Screenplay for David Hemingson.

This might seem incongruous for a “holiday movie,” but The Holdovers was directed by Alexander Payne.

In case we need reminding, Payne is most known for Nebraska (nominated for six Oscars), The Descendants (won an Oscar and was nominated for two others), Sideways (won an Oscar and was nominated for four others), About Schmidt (nominated for two Oscars) and Election (nominated for one Oscar). 

That award-winning pedigree shines through every frame of The Holdovers and puts it in the front ranks of the character-driven, narrative-focused dramedies for which Payne, and his leading man Giamatti, are rightly famous.

In this case, Payne roots the story on the grounds of elite New England boarding school Barton Academy in the waning days of December 1970. Here we find all the expected elements of patrician education in the blue-blood section of the Northeast: tidy-yet-majestic brick buildings, snow-swept sidewalks crisscrossing vacant quads and a nearby small town that has clearly seen better days following an apparent industrial downturn.

The light is perpetually tinged with a mingling of gun-metal gray and the shade of winter blue that makes you want to go back to bed for a few weeks. Under the boughs of the skeletal trees, the boys of Barton are busy getting ready for their luxury Christmas vacations — some to ski resorts, others to Caribbean islands. Weapons-grade curmudgeon and history teacher Paul Hunham (Giamatti) is having none of it, as he cracks down on his pampered, empty-headed students with a pop quiz in the final hour before vacation is to start.

Enter Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), who makes the fateful mistake of mouthing off. Hunham punishes the whole class for Angus’ sass by delaying the quiz but requiring the entire class to take their textbooks with them on their getaways. As if things couldn’t get worse for Angus, his newly remarried mother calls to inform him that he’s been disinvited to the previously scheduled trip to St. Kitts. Sorry, but he’s going to have to be a “holdover” at the school during the holiday.

A few other unfortunate kids are in the same boat, made even more unfortunate by the fact that Hunham himself is being punished for failing a senator’s son and will be required to serve as the guardian of the titular holdovers. Things get worse and worse for Angus, as circumstances intervene to result in him and Hunham being the only ones left on campus, alone but for the head cook of the school, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and the custodian Danny (Naheem Garcia), who has a deeply sweet crush on Mary. 

While Hunham sullenly slugs Jim Beam and ruminates on his lonely, futile existence and Angus hums with internal rage, hurt and despair, it’s really Mary who’s suffered the greatest tragedy. Being a single mother and Black, the only way she could see of getting her son enrolled at Barton was to take a job there. He excelled as a student but, almost immediately upon graduation, was killed in Vietnam. Freshly bereaved, it falls to her to do the basic work of keeping Hunham and Angus fed. 

The layers of race, class, gender and generational friction in this arrangement are never explicitly hashed out, but rather woven into every scene and interaction, which fuels the trajectory of the film as its characters confront themselves as much as each other and their situations. There is no grand monologue or ham-handed “moment” in this film; just a series of deeply human (and frequently hilarious) gestures that make this film feel like a tiny island of quiet authenticity in a sea of cinematic bombast, CGI confection and ulterior motives.

Perhaps the strangest effect of The Holdovers is the sense of nostalgia it evokes — though for a place and time that few, if any of us, has any real connection to. I suspect it’s nostalgia for the act of watching a movie about people who seem real. Nothing explodes, no worlds are traversed, no battles are fought and there aren’t even any real villains. Just people. In that way, maybe The Holdovers really is a holdover.