Review: The Holdovers

Directed by Alexander Payne, 2023

Indie-ish US school drama. A highly privileged, entitled but lonely group of American teens are left under the supervision of an authoritarian classics teacher in a New England boarding school during the Christmas break of 1970.

Our central teen Angus (Dominic Sessa) feels especially abandoned and rejected, as his mother has decided to cancel his home visit so that she might spend time with her new partner. If the unruly Angus continues to rebel he is likely to be expelled and sent to military school and finally Vietnam. At the same time the martinet Hunham (Paul Giamatti) really needs to stop dwelling in antiquity if he is to live and love again. 

Angus finds an unlikely, reluctant but finally true surrogate father in Hunham, whose new role helps him overcome his bitterness and failure to achieve. That great book has not been written, although many great books have been read and well taught. 

Both of the lead actors push this film into the “worth a big screen watch” category, just. The consistently excellent Paul Giamatti delivers as the curmudgeonly but principled classicist, as does Dominic Sessa, as the intelligent, soulful but tempestuous teen Angus. They take everything they can from the script.

Evocative period and location detail, as well as sharp direction and editing, create a strong sense of place and time, but this is combined with pacey but sometimes clunky storytelling, as well as some rather obvious secondary characters. The denouement is very Christmassy and suffers from overly heavy signposting.

The Holdovers suggests that at critical moments in the life of a troubled teen teachers can play a pivotal and positive role and that to do so they have to take a risk with their career, setting aside the scripts of their professional life and drawing instead on the well of their inner humanity. All true, but a touch trite. 

The Holdovers is not the best of its type. It doesn’t have the wit, style and bite of Whiplash or the character depth offered by The Breakfast Club but it is not without value. It might work well as a prompt for a discussion with new teachers. Hunham would not last long in the English system, he would be brought down by the first learner voice survey, even though, or perhaps because, he is the real academic deal.