The Holdovers (2023)
Directed by Alexander Payne
Focus Features, 133 minutes, R (F-bombs, drug use, drinking, and “nudity”)
★★★
The Holdovers is a feel-good film. It has been compared to It’s a Wonderful Life for it fairy tale transformations and its message that virtue trumps material success. Let me be upfront about it. I liked it, but I didn’t love it, even though it’s about a teacher. I jotted down my ten favorite teacher movies–from Conrack and Dead Poets Society to Stand and Deliver and Whiplash–and nothing about The Holdovers tempted me to alter my list.
It follows classics professor Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) from the final days of the 1970 fall semester to the end of Christmas break. Hunham is old school, the sort whose C- is the equivalent of an A- from anyone else. He’s grumpy, stern, exudes a strange body odor, has a lazy eye, and is absolutely intractable about his standards. Hunham once went to Barton and he has ideas about what a “Barton man” should be, hence he’s just flunked the son of a U.S. Senator and major donor. Barton is a prestigious New England private school–fictional though much of it was filmed at Northfield Mt. Hermon and Deerfield academies–but times have changed and Hunham has not. He especially has it out for students Teddy Koutnze, a rich airheaded punk, and Dominic Sessa (Angus Tully), who is bright, but also arrogant and disrespectful.
As a not-so-veiled put-down, Headmaster Hardy Woodrup, a horse’s patootie, sticks Hunham with “holdover” duty; that is, supervision of students who have nowhere to go during the break. At the last minute, Tully becomes one of them and is not at all happy that Hunham expects them to study during the break. The campus is fairly remote, the town has limited options for a teen such as Tully–Shelburne Falls is the stand-in–and students young and old feel like prisoners. One by one the students get reprieves until just one is left: Tully. That leaves him, Hunham, Joy , campus cook Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Randolph), and African American janitor Danny.
One reviewer called The Holdovers “diagrammatic,” meaning its plot draws on a host of clichés, devices, and pieces of other films that define the hard teacher with secrets/young man in need of growing up genre. That strikes me as fair commentary. In other words, director Alexander Payne opted to play things safe. The chaotic 1970s, for instance, make little more than a drive-by appearance beyond Mary’s loss of her son in the Vietnam War. You can tick off the film’s sugarcoated situations: teen rebellion, reluctant bonding between Hunham and Tully, Hunham as mentor, revelations of why teacher and student are socially gauche, psychological growth, and full-scale borrowing from the 1939 classic Goodbye, Mr. Chips.
If it sounds like I’m being Hunham-hard on the film it’s because it was predictable, but could have been much more. The problems lie with David Hemingson’s script not with its top-flight acting. Paul Giamatti is a vastly underrated actor and has been nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for The Holdovers. The film is also up for Best Picture, Hemingson for Best Original Screenplay, and Ms. Randolph is the odds-on favorite to win for Best Supporting Actress. It would be a shame, though, if any of them won. To put it bluntly, The Holdovers lacks enough gravitas to be feted. (Odds are certainly against it as Best Picture, as Payne wasn’t nominated for Best Director. It happens, but it’s rare a film wins but its director isn’t up for an award.)
The very R rating of The Holdovers seems a contrivance to give it more heft than it has. It rests on a torrent of F-bombs, drug use (pot and lithium–what next, Ibuprofen?), and “nudity,” an ancient Greek vase and an over-the shoulder peek inside a “skin” magazine. Dear MPAA: F-bombs are as common as lottery tickets, pot is legal most places, lithium is a prescription drug, and the statute of limitations for ancient Greek nudity passed 3,000 years ago.
The Holdovers is a perfectly good little movie that will give most viewers a case of the warm fuzzies, its semi-sad ending notwithstanding. Enjoy it for what it is: a decent night on the sofa that won’t tax your brain very much. I hope that someday Paul Giamatti lands a role that will yield an Oscar. But not for The Holdovers.
Rob Weir
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