Who would have thought that Alexander Payne would deliver a film full of Christmas spirit?
That’s not to say The Holdovers is saccharine and sweet, full of twinkly smiles and starry-eyed wish fulfillment. Yet not since The Descendents has Payne been this interested in human decency, rather than darkness. (Disclaimer: I missed Payne’s previous film, the Matt Damon comedy Downsizing.) Written by David Hemingson and directed by Payne (whose more bitter projects include Nebraska, Sideways, and About Schmidt), The Holdvers takes place at a New England preparatory school during the Christmas season of 1971. As everyone else leaves for the holiday break, a pompous and pitiless classics instructor is forced to stay behind and supervise five students who can’t go home for a variety of reasons.
As Paul Hunham, the teacher, Paul Giamatti is in his schlubby sweet spot, while newcomer Dominic Sessa, the student who challenges Hunham the most, shows astonishing promise. He makes the lanky, angry Angus smart, impulsive, and destructive—unable to stop himself from blurting out the worst possible truth at the worst possible moment. Bringing another perspective on the prep-school experience is Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary Lamb, the school’s cook. Mary is also staying on campus over the break, partly to mourn, in relative private, the recent death of her son in the Vietnam War. As the movie proceeds, these three are forced by circumstance to form a family of sorts.
The small joy of The Holdovers is noticing how the many early gestures of rudeness and cruelty (one of the older boys throws a younger student’s mitten in a freezing river) are eventually outweighed by begrudging expressions of affection (even, eventually, from a curmudgeon like Hunham). None of these people are predisposed to offer each other anything like grace, but against their basic instincts they somehow begin to manage it. If The Holdovers is about anything, it’s about the hard, hard work of small acts of kindness.
Throughout The Holdovers, snow is almost always in the air, and the movie proceeds as if it didn’t want to make too many tracks across that fresh white blanket. Scene transitions often involve delicate dissolves, while the camera moves, when it does, as if it doesn’t want us to notice it. The film has a gentle hush to it, even if the interior roiling of its main characters—Hunham, over his growing awareness that both his students and his colleagues despise him; Angus, over his dysfunctional family situation; and Mary, over the loss of her son—feels palpable in every scene. (There is a shot of Mary sitting against a record player, lost in her own thoughts while listening to The Temptations’ “Silent Night,” that is devastating.)
So where is that Christmas spirit? The film’s consideration of the original Christmas story goes deeper than the lovely choral renditions of holiday carols that are slipped into the score. As those acts of kindness add up, we begin to recognize them as gifts—unexpected and, in some cases, undeserved. The presents given during Advent are an echo of the gift of the gospel, which was offered by way of a lowly birth in Bethlehem. If you feel as if you’ve watched A Charlie Brown Christmas too many times (though I don’t think that’s possible), you could do worse than substituting it with The Holdovers.
(11/15/2023)
