Holdovers–No Home for the Holidays
Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is a film in the style of “Dead Poets Society”. Set in a New England prep school, Barton Preparatory, sometime in the 1970s, the predominantly white students dominate what the school administration can do. A curmudgeonly, lonely instructor, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), draws the short end of the straw and is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go: “the holdovers”. Although his self-constructed reputation has been to prepare the coddled, spoiled miscreants for a world that may not protect them because of their family wealth, most students revile him and for the most part, Hunham is proud of that. “I thought all of the Nazis had left for Argentina,” one student snarkily grouses at him. Hunham shrugs back: “I find the world a bitter and complicated place. And it seems to feel the same way about me.”
One of the students, Angus (newcomer Dominic Sessa), is a brilliant nonconformist in an educational setting that will not tolerate him. Angus has been abandoned by those who should love him for the wonder that he is: his recently remarried mother and his institutionalized father. And then there is Mary Randolph, (Da ‘Vine Joy Randolph), the no-nonsense school cook whose young son, a high-achieving Barton scholarship student who could not afford college tuition, has died while in Vietnam.
These three lonely, heartbroken people are thrown together over the Christmas holidays where joy and merriment are missing in action. The mythology of the happy-happy holiday is tested as these three main characters slowly find comfort in each other’s company with unhealed wounds we slowly come to understand. Holdovers is set at Christmas time precisely to underscore their season of “discomfort and joy” magnifying their loneliness and bereavement. After all, this is supposed to be Christmas.
This character-driven film sustains audience interest through brilliant dialog, astringent one-liners delivered with a comedic twist, dark family secrets, and cavalier treatment by institutions who chew them up instead of protecting and nurturing those in their care. The understated intelligence and sensitivity of all three actors– Giamatti, Randolph, and Cessa– epitomize the understanding that the past can impede one’s efforts to be decent and humane in the present. All three refuse to believe that there are no longer any options and that they are trapped.
A moving, unrelentingly positive narrative with powerful red-hot coals of cynicism left in ashes. Holdovers believes–no, is convinced–that even when we are caught in a web of hurt, we also can be in a web of healing and mercy.
A winner destined to be a classic!
Availability: Amazon Prime