The Holdovers

Director: Alexander Payne (USA). Year of Release: 2023

Christmas 1970. A boys’ choir is practising O Little Town of Bethlehem in three part harmony. But it’s not the tune we’re used to, maybe it’s one that is specific to posh public schools. We’re in Barton Academy, where New England’s rich send their boys so that they don’t have them hanging around at home. Opulence abounds, as does the stench of privilege. This is where the ruling class is taught the arrogance which makes them think that they are better than you or me.

Soon we’re in the Ancient Civilisations class where Mr. Hunham is handing back homework. Most boys get grades of D or below. If you’ve seen the trailer you can see the sarcastic disdain with which Hunham treats his charges much better than I can put into words. But one of his pupils is almost adequate. Angus Tully, who we’ve just seen arrogantly taunting kids who cannot join their parents on expensive Christmas holidays, has got a B+.

Fate is about to throw Tully and Hunham together. Tully’s parents – his mother and “a rich guy she just married” – decide that spending some time with their kid is not a priority, and that they won’t be taking him to St Kitts after all. Hunham, meanwhile, is to be punished for giving a bad grade to the son of a major donor to the school. He must spend Christmas looking after the Holdovers – the kids who stay on campus – even though it isn’t his turn,

Hunham is arrogant and self-obsessed, given to quoting Latin and giving Marcus Aurelius books as Christmas presents. He regards his students as “vulgar little Philistines” and “reprobates.” The students, in turn, hate the one master who doesn’t nod them through to an élite University without them having to put in any work. They taunt the fact that he has a glass eye, and smells of fish – something to do with his body’s inability to break down trimethylamine

Paul Hunham is a mass of contradictions. He wears a bow tie and tweed jacket, but when he goes out he hides them under a duffel coat. He also went to Barton Academy, and now teaches there, but he got in on a scholarship, not because his parents were over-wealthy. He went to Harvard, but was expelled after getting into a fight with a kid with a much richer father. He would live to be part of the upper class, but knows that they would never accept him.

Tully is just as arrogant as Hunham in his own way – but his is the privilege of the rich, for whom empathy is an optional extra. At the same time, he has lost his father and his new step-father clearly sees him as a burden, for which he didn’t sign on when he married Angus’s mother. Tully is hurting inside, and plays up as a way of gaining the attention which people of his class assume to be their birth right.

I know it’s not new to have high school kids played by people who are older, but there’s something incongruous is watching Dominic Sessa, who’s in his twenties, playing Angus – especially in the various scenes where adults prevent him from drinking alcohol. Look I know that this is set in the States, where the liquor laws are mad, but seeing someone that old having his drink consumption regulated like this just feels wrong.

Hunham and Tully are joined in the school by Mary, a cook, because heaven forfend that rich white men should have to cook for themselves. Mary is Black and has recently lost her son Curtis in the Vietnam war. She is clearly unable to cope with her grief, often drinking and weeping. When the three end up at a Christmas party, Mary dominates the record player, insisting on the jazz records that Curtis used to like, despite the plea of other party-goers to put on something hipper.

This had all the chances of turning into sentimental mush. Will the various characters lose some of their self-regard and become slightly nicer people? Will this result in one of them sacrificing themselves in an uncharacteristic gesture? Well, of course. This is what happens in this sort of film. But the script and the acting (particularly by Paul Giamatti as a man who’s contempt for the world around him is just diverting his sense of personal failure) is sharp enough to keep us entertained.

The ongoing war in Vietnam pervades the film, from Mary’s photo of Curtis in uniform to background radio reports. But the most notable aspect of the ongoing war is the way that it does not directly affect the privileged students of Barton Academy. The sons of the rich know that they are on their way to Ivy League College with all the draft dodging opportunities that these provide. They don’t even need to excel at school – their rich parents will see that they get through.

But for all the film’s apparent progressiveness, there remains a little; “who will think of the rich white kids?” about it all. It is true that Paul says that it’s kids like Curtis who are sent to fight and die in Vietnam, while the posh kids get to draft dodge in Harvard. But Curtis only exists in the film as a photograph. We are asked to invest much more emotion in Angus, because his rich parents want to send him to military school – that is, to reduce him towards the same level as Curtis.

The Holdovers is about class and race, but maybe not in the manner which it intended. It is more about self-loathing White liberals who wring their hands about the lives of their social inferiors, but rarely allows these people a voice of their own. Even Mary isn’t any old cook – she is the kitchen manager, and Curtis was allowed to go to Barton (even if he was not afforded the draft dodging opportunities of his richer, whiter contemporaries).

In short, this is a film which is worth seeing for the acting, and has a number of good jokes. But it is not as profound as it thinks it is. While it’s great to see a film that says that war and privilege are bad, it never quite manages to escape its own privileged surroundings.