The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s Oscar-nominated indie hit starring Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, was a bit of a surprise success. Set in 1970, the film feels very of that era on a deep level – in aesthetics but more importantly in its being totally unafraid of sincere sentimentality.
“The world doesn’t make sense anymore. I mean, it’s on fire. The rich don’t give a shit. Poor kids are cannon fodder. Integrity is a punchline.”
The film is a deeply empathetic exploration of the damage that can come from feeling abandoned and how fighting through the fear and reaching out for connection can change your life, even when you thought that would never be possible.
“You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?”
So let’s take a deeper look at The Holdover’s heartfelt messages about not getting trapped by your past, found families, and learning to imagine a brighter future for yourself even in the midst of great darkness. (We’ll also unpack the whole plagiarism scandal.) Let’s dive in!
Falling Apart
The Holdovers feels like a slice of the past in many ways starting right from its warm, lived in visual style – which was, surprisingly, shot digitally (which we’ll go into in a moment.) This idea of using new styles and ideas to update beloved parts of past films runs throughout the film, including its usage of well-worn tropes that are updated to feel more fresh and relatable to modern audiences. Set at Barton Academy, a boarding school for the children of the well-to-do, over the winter break of 1970, we follow a small handful of lonely individuals who feel detached from the world around them.
We first meet professor Paul Hunham – not the uplifting, inspirational professor you might expect in this type of film, Paul is instead a curmudgeonly hermit who’s more interested in ‘um, actually’-ing everyone than actually having conversations.
“What can you do? As Democritus said, ‘O kósmos alloíosis, o víos ypólipsis.’ ‘World is decay. Life is perception.’”
He does have a drive to push his students to be the best, but he doesn’t go about it in a way that engenders admiration. He takes joy in the low grades most of his students receive in his class, and isn’t at all concerned about how they might feel about what they’re learning or him.
“He was a great kid. I had him one semester. Very insightful.” “Mm-hmm. He hated you. He said you were a real asshole.” “Well, uh, like I said… sharp kid, insightful.”
And it’s not just the students who don’t like him – his abrasive nature has turned pretty much the entire staff against him, save for a few key people who can see that there’s a better person hiding under that hard shell. While he tells himself he’s perfectly happy with his lot in life – teaching students who despise him and hardly ever leaving campus – it quickly becomes clear that there’s a yearning for something more brewing deep within Paul.
“Went to college and never looked back.” “Well you did, a little. You came back here.”
He very decidedly does not want to stay over break to watch the titular holdovers – the kids with nowhere to go for the two week period – but has the job foisted onto him at the last minute anyways.
One of the holdovers is Angus Tully, a rich kid who is smart but has a less than stellar attitude and a bad habit of lashing out at those around him. His mother has essentially ditched him for her new husband, canceling the beach getaway he had been looking forward to and leaving him stuck at school so she can go on a honeymoon. Angus on paper seems like an archetypal ‘poor little rich kid’ – flush with cash but mentally scarred thanks to a home life lacking in love, who takes out his pain on those around him.
“That’s why you grind everybody, because deep down you know you’re an asshole. Plus, academically, you’re a disaster. I mean, if I were your parents, I’d never want you home again. The only tool in your room is you.”
But the film allows him to have a deeper, more fleshed out story, building him into a character that we truly feel sympathy for. Underneath all of his bravado and cynicism, there’s clearly a caring kid who feels totally lost in life.
“I can’t keep it together. I lie. I steal. I piss people off. I don’t have any friends, real friends.”
And we come to find that the more abrasive parts of his attitude are born not out of rage but fear – his father is not dead, as he tells people, but very much alive and suffering from acute mental illness. Watching this beloved parent’s life fall apart right before his eyes was deeply affecting for Angus, and filled him with a dread that he, too, would one day suffer the same fate.
The third character stuck in this winter limbo is Mary Lamb, the school’s cafeteria manager. Unlike Paul and Angus, Mary’s lonely state doesn’t stem from a grating personality – she is very kind and has no problem connecting with the people around her – but from tragedy. Her son Curtis, who had been a student at Barton but had to enter the military after school instead of going off to college like the other wealthier pupils, died in Vietnam not long before the events of the film. She tries her best to be okay and continue on with her life, but the loss of her son has left an aching void in her soul. Though she is underappreciated by many at the school, especially the bratty rich kids, she is still able to form important bonds – even Paul, as standoffish as he is with others, has forged a friendship with her. Mary is deeply kind and caring, but also importantly not afraid to call people out when they need it. She pushes Paul and Angus to be better by confronting them about their attitudes, but also, even more importantly, by showing them what it means to be open to and cherish human connection.
Coming Together
While these characters begin this winter holiday alone, circumstance quickly forces them into a new level of closeness. The heat in the dorms and staff quarters is shut off for the break, so Paul and Angus must take up residence in the infirmary. This also brings them closer to Mary, as they all come together to watch game shows. Though Paul and Angus are constantly butting heads (and annoying Mary), the three quickly find a new depth of connection with one another.
“I’d like to propose a toast to my two companions on this snowy island.”
A big reason that Paul and Angus are at odds – but also why they’re able to deeply understand one another – is because, deep down, they are very similar. They have a shared interest in history and in pushing other people’s buttons with their smarts. They also share some heavier aspects of their lives, as well, as Paul at one point realizes that they take the same depression medication. Their host of similarities allow them to connect across their generational divide.
“Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man’s every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you.”
Paul has spent his career hoping that his hard-headed, heavy-handed approach to teaching would help build character and instill a desire to learn in his wayward students, but had over time come to feel that this was a bit of a lost cause. With Angus, however, he finds a new spark – he realizes that he does truly have the opportunity to connect with this student and possibly change his life for the better in a very real way. His age allows him to see life, and the trials Angus is going through, within the larger picture, which means he can give some crucial insight to the lost young man.
“You’re just a kid. And you’re smart. You’ve got time to turn things around.”
He can see clearly that deep down Angus is a good kid with the possibility of a very bright future ahead of him, but he also knows that Angus needs a good push in the right direction to get there. And Angus provides an important wakeup call for Paul, too. He calls Paul out on his poor attitude and how it affects the people around him.
Together, the trio form a short-term found family at a time when they all need it the most.
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a real family Christmas like this before. Thank you, Mary.”
While Mary hasn’t spent her life disconnected from the world in the way that Paul and Angus have, her son’s recent death (and the pain of the death of her son’s father in a horrible accident years ago) have left her feeling unmoored. Her struggle comes from not only having to accept the reality of her son truly being gone, but also opening herself back up to the world again. Her sister is pregnant with her first child, and thinking about this new life coming into the world when her child was ripped away so suddenly is incredibly painful. But it’s through reconnecting with her sister and getting excited about continuing Curtis’ legacy through this new life, that she is able to find joy again. She also provides a softer counterbalance to Paul and Angus’ more abrasive personalities, providing them a tether to the rest of the human world that they’ve cut themselves off from.
The film is grounded in the idea that it’s better to put up a fight for yourself and the life you know you want than to just give up and disappear. And it ends with each character turning a new leaf and moving toward the next chapter of their lives. Mary is excited to help her sister raise her new baby (and has even started a college fund for them, so that the baby will be able to attend university like Curtis was unable to), Angus (thanks to a hail mary by Paul) gets to finish his schooling at Barton instead of being sent to a military academy, and Paul, after getting fired for the antics he and Angus got up to during the break, is finally, for the first time, moving on with his life. The world of possibilities stretches out in front of all of them, and they’re finally ready to start taking their first steps forward.
Building The World… & Plagiarism Concerns?
The look of the film contributes so much to its warm, deeply nostalgic aura, and director Alexander Payne and cinematographer Eigil Bryld did a lot of work to pull it off. While it at first looks very much like it was shot on a 1970s film stock, the film was in fact shot on digital. More than replicating the exact look of 70s films, though, the team were more interested in making sure they got the right feeling.
“If you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.”
From the wide, empty expanses showing how alone the characters are on their own little island, to closeups that allow us to truly feel their deepest emotions, the film expertly uses its visuals to pull us into this quiet, complicated world.
One surprising issue with the film popped up just before the Oscars as Variety dropped an exclusive detailing that Simon Stephenson, the screenwriter for films like Paddington 2 and Luca, had contacted the Writers Guild of America to allege that The Holdovers script had plagiarized a script of his from years ago. According to the report, Stephenson had shared his script, Frisco – about a disgruntled doctor being left to care for a teenager, with The Holdovers director Payne before Payne began working on his own film with screenwriter David Hemingson. The examples shared with Variety do at first seem pretty egregious, until you notice some of the notes, like that Stephenson actually removed parts of his own script to make it look more similar to The Holdover’s for the complaint – for example noting that he removed the voice over from his own script to show how similar the rest of the film’s intro is to The Holdovers, but then in the end all that’s left is an opening sequence that is similar to hundreds, if not thousands, of films. Other parts of the complaint might be more convincing, though. According to the report, Stephenson is still working with the WGA to get his complaint brought up to the board, so only time will tell if they do end up agreeing that there was plagiarism in this case.
But in the end, the film mainly seems to share general similarities with Stephenson’s script – similarities that it indeed shares with many films within the same genre. From Dead Poets Society’s ‘professor inspires students and then gets in trouble and is fired’ to Igby Goes Down’s ‘troubled rich kid with aloof mother and mentally ill father finds new meaning to life through misadventure with older companion’ and beyond, the film shares similar beats with lots of films, but pulls everything together in its own way. And Payne himself even said that he took the basic plot of The Holdovers from another film – but just not Stephenson’s.
“I had the idea for the movie — that I stole from a 1935 French movie I’d seen at a film festival about a dozen years ago — and I thought ‘That’s a good premise for a movie.’ Not the story, how it pans out, but the premise.” - Alexander Payne, Rough Cut Podcast
It turns out that the likely story is that The Holdovers is, like most films, an amalgamation of inspirations and previous works.
CONCLUSION
The Holdovers is a heartfelt film that manages to retain a comfortable, nostalgic atmosphere while feeling relevant to our modern world.
“There’s nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully.”
Unafraid to lean into sentimentality, it dove deep into the sad hearts of its characters to pull out something deeply touching and encouraging. In a time when we can all feel a little lost and out of step with the world, drawn into cynicism by our disconnect from those around us, The Holdovers reminds us how important it is to not snuff out that light within yourself that seeks connection, but to instead foster it and use it to help yourself and others see the way forward.
“Keep your head up. You can do this.” “Yeah, I was gonna tell you the same thing.”