2023 Movie of the Year 'The Holdovers
A New Critical Analysis & Appreciation That Doesn't Worship the F***ing Director
Imagine someone who annoys you, slaps you across the face, then insults you. But then it is revealed that this person suffers the same pain you do, and they are a mirror of your own life experiences, heading towards similar disasters that shaped you into the lumpy clay that rolls unevenly down the roads of your life. You could help this person avoid the traumas that you have endured. What do you do? If you enjoy stories about people helping people who slapped them but showing compassion and mercy instead of hitting back, then the film The Holdovers is for you.
There is no such thing as an objectively perfect film. Cinema is a subjective experience. Not even the dollars earned by movie ticket sales, combined with the number of digital views, can determine a film’s actual value because the true value of Cinema lies in the unique pockets of experience that put divots in our hearts and minds when art functions properly inside the observer. Likewise, determining perfection in a film is a fool’s errand if the analysis is not properly structured and funded by an appreciation for the story. What is the story told? How does it work? Why does it matter to the caring and sensitive humans watching?
Let’s separate angles of inspection for this film into the two categories of exploration and analysis in New Criticism:
• Narrative & Moral Value: What compelling story does this film tell? What does this story mean to the human being concerned with doing good in the world and lessening their burden of impact on others?
• Technique: Which technical choices created, enhanced, and enriched the story told on screen?
Narrative and Moral Value
The Holdovers is about a friendship that breaks through the masks of duty we wear daily; it is a love story, but not a sexy one. PAUL HUNHAM is rapidly approaching decrepitude in his life and works as a private history teacher in the same school he attended as a young man, THE BARTON ACADEMY. Paul is lumpy, erudite, and massively depressed. Nothing in life has worked out how he imagined, despite the apparent brilliance he forces on his students like a wet blanket of scorn every day he stands at the podium.
Paul takes pharmaceutical medicine daily to boost his mood and stave his rage over the indignities he has endured despite his soaring intelligence. Paul is brilliant, but he is not kind. He doesn’t know how to speak to people without broadcasting his earned knowledge, forcing it on them like a socially endured assault. In one scene, he lectures a bartender and a drunk Santa Claus on the history of Saint Nicholas, the Turk. The men have no idea what he has said, despite their ability to speak and understand English. Later, Paul confesses to his young protégé, “I find the world a bitter and complicated place, and it seems to feel the same about me. I think you and I have this in common.”
Paul’s protégé is a Junior shithead called ANGUS TULLY. This kid has been kicked out of several private schools and should be a Senior. Like Paul, he’s brilliant, but he’s a discipline case. Angus’s brief living experience has been bent by circumstance and possibly his genetics. His father is currently institutionalized for a debilitating mental illness, though it’s easier for Angus to tell others that his father is dead. The young man pushes to find the boundaries of decorum and legality, often barreling past them like a child jumping over the edge of Niagara Falls, thinking something will catch him on the way down. It’s the kind of errant faith that only blooms in a certain period of youth under specific conditions, one being the presence of a pillow of generational wealth. The other is having the right skin color in 1970s America.
Being wealthy is not a prerequisite to attending Barton Academy, a private Massachusetts secondary school that is mourning its first victim of the Vietnam War. The first “Barton Man” to die in combat over in Southeast Asia was the son of the kitchen manager, MARY LAMB, the kind and beautiful Black woman who, through her brief inconsolable grief, instructs these sad men how to live a more authentic life. And here is the only racial lens I will apply to this New Film Criticism: the frail white men in this story are held up by strong Black hands that do not waiver in their support, even under insult and suffering through massive trauma.
The reason wealth factors in this movie is that Mary could not afford to send her son Curtis to college despite his brilliance and grades after graduating from Barton. Because of a lack of resources, Curtis got drafted to go to Vietnam and died. Because his mother was poor, young Curtis never made it to 25, and he shares this in common with his father, who died in a workplace accident as a stevedore. There is a theme of generational echo in this film, which brings us back to Paul and Angus, now stuck together over the Christmas holiday, a situation Barton has institutionalized as “Holding Over.” Angus’s mother has remarried to a man Angus despises because he’s not his father. Angus plans to spend the vacation with his Mother, but she rejects him at the last minute, leaving him to stay in this lonely, desolate place in the white wintertime.
Alternately, Paul was planning to spend his holiday alone, reading mystery novels. Instead, through an act of treachery by one of his peer professors, he is commanded to oversee the holdovers, a small group of rejected kids who dwindles down to just Angus after one wealthy boy’s father rescues the others for a ski trip on a helicopter. Angus couldn’t go because Paul could not reach his Mother for consent.
Watching the holdover students is a punishment from the Headmaster, a former student of Paul’s who finds him as insufferable to manage as being in his first class years ago as a young teacher. Paul recently flunked the son of a Senator (and Barton’s key donor), preventing the young man from being accepted to an Ivy League college. Paul punitively played his card of authority, ultimately costing him his job, but in a manner that will unfold on Paul’s terms. What ultimately happens is his choice, and he makes a moral one that will possibly save Angus’s young life.
Angus, for his part, is brilliant despite being massively depressed. His father’s illness has ripped apart his family, leaving Angus alone and ostracized among peers his age, very much like Paul has been his entire life, including his years at Barton. Angus consumes the same daily medicine for depression as Paul does. This revelation occurs to Paul later in the film after Angus drops his prescription bottle on the hotel floor, and this moment is a moral marker in this film, the point at which everyone’s future hinges and changes in ways we hope will be for the betterment of all involved. Paul begrudgingly realizes that helping Angus is also helping himself. Along with grieving Mother Mary holding over, they all drop their act of pretending to be okay and become people in pain together, briefly helping each other ascend the hen house ladder (“shitty and short”) of momentary redemption.
This film is a tale of emotional survival by two rejects, forced together through circumstance and eventually by mutual gratitude and appreciation. The Holdovers is about how broken people can come together despite their differences and choose to heal each other with honesty, compassion, and small gestures of convivial effort. When we meet them, none of these primary characters is whole and can participate effectively in society, but they instruct each other and briefly bridge their broken gaps together in a way that ossify the breaks to endure even more indignity.
Technique
The opening intro scenes feature vinyl record pop sounds and ancient font from fifty years ago that works together to paint us into an older era of time, a throwback before pocket phones got smart and people got dumb. Welcome to 1970. Everything about this movie feels vintage, from the Focus Features jingle bleeding into the dark dialogue opening. A black screen masks a scene of choir instruction for a Christmas concert, into which we are thrown like baby birds bucked out of a warm nest by a skillful and kind motherbeak. We are told, “In the beginning, there was the word,” and so it is established within the mythology of The Holdovers. As viewers, we are initially handicapped without vision, constrained to assay this situation with our ears and visually limited to the words on the screen, announcing that this is an ALEXANDER PAYNE movie. From here, let us forget the Director’s name and fall into the vortex of these characters in this place and time.
The darkness fades into light, and our frame has a healthy and unique aspect ratio of 1.66:1. In these opening scenes that place us in time and situation, note how well the expansive scene of the college, with its riveting waterfalls pushing through ice and snow, fit into the same view as the group of choir kids diligently rehearsing for their concert. Barton Academy is a place of serious scholarship for young people. The choir exhibits a diversity of young male faces, like a United Nations that doubtfully existed in prep-school Massachusetts in the early 1970s. This racial bouquet of young men is the first indicator that what we are watching is a fairy tale, and every fairy tale is also a moral story.
The 1.66:1 ratio easily handles the frozen, beautiful landscape of the school, the stoic tundras and Manila museums of Boston, Pantone classroom scenes, and false eye-rolling closeups. This aspect ratio allows for an expansive but intimate collection of scenes that synthesize into a story that will never stop telling itself in the minds of sensitive viewers paying attention.
When the balance is strong between narrative and technique, that’s when we have the perfect aspect ratio for the entire film, not just simulated murder action scenes or brief vignettes of characters humping each other. Too much of American Cinema has been devoted to fighting and fucking. What these characters expose to one another and endure together in this film is far more critical and intimate. To honestly tell a story this worthy, films need aspect ratios that serve the whole narrative, and 1.66 delivers for the viewer of The Holdovers.
Technical Decisions for Discussion
(1m36s) In the opening choir scene, two boys look at the camera, puncturing the fourth wall. Whether intentional or not, for the viewer, it means the movie is aware it is being watched, which makes it a very different work of art to engage. Self-aware art speaks to observers in a way other than art that doesn’t know it is art.
(2:25–3:42) The song playing over the scenic introduction is
’s Silver Joy, music that is melancholy with sadness held in reserve. In this song, we feel the sorrow of loss and the anger of what could have been, with a grueling acceptance of what is. It’s a song where the singer begs to be let alone in his solitude. “Do not disturb me. Let me be.” But then the soundtrack halts as we move into Paul’s private quarters. Classical music plays while he grades essays in scorn, but not before we are shown his disorganized bathroom with Preparation H and footpowder on the sink, revealing a man biologically ailing. Paul lives in his small and isolated world, inside the one taking place outside, where that song is being sung, a false simulacrum that will rapidly come undone before our eyes.(30m7s) There is a rough fade cut in one of the most crucial early scenes in the film, where Paul admonishes the little racist shithead who strikes out at Mary because she’s black, works for her money, and now survives on the compassion of others overseeing her suffering the loss of her son. Several seconds after Paul’s emotional outburst and the justified and valuable moral lesson he teaches these kids, just as he tells them to eat their goddamned dinners and shut the fuck up, the scene fades into a dark hallway where Paul is walking the Night Watch, securing the Infirmary and other school buildings. While possibly due to a technical choice (e.g., perhaps someone laughed and ruined the end of that take), we must work with what’s on-screen and not seek the easy editorial explanation of the oral history. What does that fade cut mean to the observer? This scene bleeds from a moment of justified outrage and moral instruction to one of servitude and protection, the forces pushing in on Paul as he balances his dedication to shaping young men to face a rapidly unhinged world. In this aspect, the story is both modern and relevant, justifying this strange cut.
(1h44m26s-1h50m36s) One of the tells of any film is how it uses scenes shot with shallow depth of field. This is when a blurred background highlights characters in the forefront. This technique begins in the third act when Angus coerces Paul into coming with him to see his father in the Boston mental institution where his Mom and new Stepfather have parked his Dad like a boarded dog. So begins several minutes of revelation in a shallow depth of field. The observer cannot look away from the people on screen and what they say. The scene between Angus and his ill father bleeds into a restaurant conversation with Paul afterward, revealing themselves and their pain to one another. “This whole goddamned trip is entre nous,” Paul continually confirms to Angus, cementing their bond and sealing his fate as an adjunct teacher at Barton Academy. The shallow depth of field is broken when Mary rejoins them. What has just occurred is a descent into Hell and claiming a moral prize. These men have found their shared humanity together, and the film that comes out of these scenes is changed from the one that went into them.
Final Thoughts
The Holdovers is a melancholy Christmas film but one which, in final summary, espouses the tenets of the Winter Holiday that go beyond any particular secular or religious celebration. This movie is about pain and sacrifice for others. The Holdovers is a film for those considering thoughts of self-harm, treading water in deep pools of isolation. It’s a Christmas movie for sad people and people who seek to understand why others are sad at Christmas time.
Despite the sad and sober trauma it works through on our behalf, there is hope in this film and even a small dignity at the end. It’s beautiful visually and thematically, and it sounds lovely as well. The words and the music amplify the expressive facial acting. And The Holdovers is deeply funny, though not in a slapstick manner. You could become better by watching this movie more than once, and it will be a Christmas holiday playlist staple for as long as I can appreciate its value.
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I loved this movie - it actually tells a human and believable story. And any parent who has loved a kid who has hurt them with their obnoxious behavior understands this movie to its core.
JB, Well done. Made me think about free tuition for a second, which was how I got lured to college full time...my father was a teamster on the grounds crew. Children of full-timers got 'free tuition'.