“The Holdovers,” December 31, 2023, theater. We were hoping to go down to Long Island to spend New Years Eve with friends and then visit with others. Instead, I got a cold and our friends, with apt caution, suggested we should not come down and infect others. They were right, of course. Half the guests came down with Covid although all were supposed to test before the gathering. Life is weird like that sometimes.
There we were, holdovers, so to speak, wondering what to do for the holiday. So we went to the 4 p.m. showing on December 31 of a movie about holdovers during the holidays. The film covers an entire Christmas/New Years break of course, but well, it did seem right.
This well-written (David Hemingson) and -directed (Alexander Payne) narrative is elevated by the cast’s excellent work from top to bottom and especially from the three principals, Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and Dominic Sessa. Despite its traditional and sometime conventional format, the film works. Giamatti and Randolph both took home Golden Globes, while 21-year old Sessa is being touted as a breakout newcomer.
They are ‘holdovers,’ stuck at the private boys’ school (five private schools served as film locales) Paul Hunham (Giamatti) and Mary Lamb (Da’Vine) work at and Sessa (Angus Tully) attends. Hunham is the relentlessly curmudgeonly and even mean-spirited ancient and classical civilizations/history teacher charged with babysitting Tully, the smart but troubled student whose mother has bailed on him over the holidays for time with her new husband. Mary Lamb is the head of the school kitchen charged with providing them with victuals. [An un-necessary aside here: why is it almost always an unloved history teacher who is the pedant/grinch/taskmaster in these movies? Not that I have a personal stake in this.]
Lamb’s son has only recently died in Vietnam, Hunham was rejected for WWII service, and Tully is threatened with military school– and thus Vietnam — if he messes up and is thrown out of a school again. Their adventures and misadventures, comic, painful and deeply tragic, their sadness and losses, their aloneness, and their intimate revelations enable powerful emotional connection and growth.
Part of the film is set during a ‘road trip’ to Boston, a much cleaner version of the city than I remember from a visit in ’75. Still, it was fun to know the territory that featured the Museum of Fine Arts, the Brattle Book Store, Chinatown and the Combat Zone, and even the Chateau restaurant in Waltham a few miles from where we live.