'The Holdovers' Review
Image courtesy of Miramax
A popular refrain that has followed The Holdovers in its reception is ‘they don’t make them like they used to’ – a strange appraisal for a movie released in 2023. Yet, Payne’s movie manages to evoke a time past, infused with the familiarity of the classics it invokes, from the opening credits sequence and the vintage graphics of the Miramax logo to the storylines it follows. As 1970 draws to a close, we follow a boy called Angus Tulley, left behind for the holidays at Barton, a sequestered New England boarding school, under the care of Paul Giamatti’s Paul Hunham. The film is constantly exploring the relationship between new and old; it is a funny time-capsule of a movie, but the pockets of time, events of the past, Mr Hunham’s beloved Ancient History itself, start to affect the present. As the characters are forced to engage with the past, so this tension within The Holdovers plays out for the audience too.
Payne’s direction and Hemingson’s screenplay imbue its characters with a depth beyond any superficial evocation of nostalgia; The Holdovers is confrontational in a way that differs from the films it has been appraised alongside. Particularly, the film’s treatment of its supporting characters sees a departure from the trope-ridden, tragedy-in-place-of-depth convention of the canon the movie draws from. Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s character Mary Lamb, a cook at the school, mourning the death of her son in the Vietnam war, is a beautifully portrayed, perfectly written portrait of grief, a character that feels genuine and fully formed. Race and class are not topics that are glossed over in the film, nor are they passingly acknowledged with a self-satisfied nod to the audience, as has become a norm in other ‘period pieces’ recently. Instead, the film constantly brings us back down to earth – the landscape of a snowy New England boarding school, sitting abandoned over Christmas, could easily take on a fairy-tale quality, could become so far removed as to serve only as the cosy liminal space in which our characters develop. But we are reminded at every turn that there is a world outside the snow-globe of the film, a world in which war and familial tragedy and ghosts of past strife are at large. As Paul and Angus discuss the great things that Barton men go on to do, they both repeat ‘except Curtis Lamb’. We are not allowed for a second to forget Mary’s grief.
The movie holds an incredible realism that is striking next to its comedy. There is a focus on bodily and mental aberrations – Paul’s various illnesses and the vivid descriptions of them, the eventual reveal that Angus and Paul take the same medication for depression, Angus’ visit to his dad, and the long, unflinching shot of Angus’s dislocated shoulder, unusual for the type of film The Holdovers initially looks to be. This realism is what drives the movie, aided by the critically acclaimed acting from Paul Giamatti, as well as Dominic Sessa in his acting debut, having been plucked from the drama department of a school in the Massachusetts area in which the movie was shot. It is in this sincerity that the movie diverges from films it has been defined alongside – a coming of age, a healing, and a connection that feels simply real.
The Holdovers manages to capture a momentary familiarity clashing with something having changed, shifted – that singular feeling you get when alone in a usually-full school building.