The Holdovers: Embracing Change

Picture this: you're strolling down a sun-kissed beach, sporting your favorite sunglasses and comfy flip flops, tracing the shoreline. Every now and then, the salty water playfully engulfs your feet and flip flops. Ever attempted the art of walking in wet sand with flip flops? It's not a pastime I engage in regularly either, but I can envision it becoming a bit challenging over time. Suddenly, one of your flip flops gets stubbornly stuck! In a blink, the tide carries it away on its own adventure, leaving you frantically trying to rescue it. Despite your best efforts, the flip flop disappears from sight. After a relentless pursuit and search, you find yourself seated in the sand, feeling a tinge of sadness. What is one flip without its flop?

Then, a realization dawns on you. Standing up, you grab the remaining flip flop, hurl it into the sea as far as you can, and continue on your way with a cheerful stride. Perfectly balanced and without regrets. Occasionally, you reminisce about the flip flops – life was undoubtedly better with them. However, that doesn't stop you from embracing the present and moving forward. 

This is the best way that I can summarize the main theme of The Holdovers (2023) by Alexander Payne: the pain, art, and bliss of letting go.

© Universal Pictures

About a Barton boy

The perfect timeframe for a christmas story

New England, just days before Christmas in the early ‘70s, Barton Academy boarding school. This becomes our home for the next 2 hours and 13 minutes, since leaving campus or its immediate environs is not permitted. In his office, grading student papers, we meet Paul Hunham, a.k.a. Mr. Hunham. From this point on, it becomes clear what kind of teacher we’re dealing with—a man without the letters A or B in his alphabet, who relishes delivering graded papers with a resounding smack on the students’ table. Paul Giamatti perfectly portrays this role, known best as Rhino in The Amazing Spider-man 2 (I’m kidding), bringing the gritty, spiteful existence of Mr. Hunham to life. However, even though he already sounds like your favorite high school teacher, he brings a certain amount of fun to the character, as if there’s something more beyond this masquerade.

The students are also present, obviously. This is still a school. Being a boarding school, there’s no shortage of privileged, shortsighted teenagers who seem to have no clue why they’re actually there. This is something that Mr. Hunham seems to hate the most about them, as reflected in Dr. Green's quote:

Since it’s close to Christmas, classes are about to end, and students can go home to be with their families and loved ones. However, not everyone is as fortunate. Those a little less loved or who have no one to love them will spend Christmas on campus, along with their appointed teacher, you guessed it: Mr. Hunham. One student, however, stands out. With a name that could be the new rage in Westeros, Agnus Tully, played by rising star Dominic Sessa, is a smart (but not brilliant) student eagerly anticipating his winter break on the tropical island of Saint Kitts. To his surprise, he discovers that he, too, is one of The Holdovers (2023) this year.

To cook for them over this period, the grieving lunch lady Mary Lamb, played by the amazingly talented Da'Vine Joy Randolph, also stays on campus for the holidays. Struck by the death of her son Curtis in the Vietnam War, Mary wants to remain close to him in some way, as Curtis went to Barton before enlisting. Mary is what you’d imagine a lunch lady to be— not particularly happy about the job, but too indifferent to be unhappy about it. She seems to share a vicious hatred for the mean, entitled students with her compatriot Mr. Hunham. Despite her attempts to socialize and work through her pain, the grief she feels for her son often wins in daily interactions, making her connections with people feel short-lived and painful.

Visions of Carthage

And so, a story begins. Soon, revelations will follow that bring teacher, student, and lunch lady closer together. The tale itself, the writing, is remarkably crafted. The writer, David Hemingson, mostly known for his writing credits in “How I Met Your Mother” and “American Dad!”, carefully constructed these characters, somehow infusing a personal touch into each of them, as if retelling a touching story from memory.

This story is brought to the screen by Alexander Payne, whose career has had its highs and lows, with some notable movies like Sideways and Nebraska. However, this one stands out as his magnum opus, showing great promise for the future. What's interesting about his take on the story is how he never lets the comedy overshadow the situation, despite the constant threat. There are many great comedic moments handled with care and good timing, ensuring they never drown out the story's seriousness, making the funny situations feel entirely possible and realistic.

Payne also skillfully controls the music. In the beginning, it is very classical and “saintlike”, reflecting Barton and the current status quo. Along the movie's lines, as this status quo changes, a clear shift in the type of music played can be heard. It becomes more modern (for the time being) and upbeat with each whimsical moment that passes, allowing the uptight drama to evolve into a more loose comedy, but without losing any tension.

You couldn’t wish for a better start to a movie career than Dominic Sessa’s captivating, touching portrayal of Agnus Tully. It might not be his best performance, but it's definitely enough to show the troubled mind of the student in a way that makes us feel sorry for him. It is, however, pretty clear that it's a “don’t judge the book by its cover” story when it comes to Tully. This is often a linear path that’s difficult to make interesting. After all, a pubescent boy that acts tougher than he is is a trope we’ve seen many times. But besides that, I personally believe he’s done a great job showing the soft layer under the hard shell while dealing with the necessary secrets that lie within. And let’s not forget about Da'Vine Joy Randolph playing Mary Lamb, probably the most important character in the story. She played the role with a sort of professionalism and dedication that is difficult to reproduce, showing the different stages of grief in such a wonderful and understanding way and possibly causing the theme of the movie to be made more clear to the audience through an experience that most of humankind has gone through: losing someone you love.

This brings us to an important part in the review and sheds light on why I shared that brief narrative about the flip-flop and the beach earlier on. At its core, this narrative revolves around recognizing when something is too good to linger, when contentment with the present could be surpassed by embracing the possibility of more. Each character in the film harbors a dream, a wish, a longing for something they genuinely believe would bring them happiness, yet there's a lingering incompleteness. Their aspirations are within reach, grounded in reality, but there's an elusive element—their ultimate desires, the seemingly impossible dreams they dare not entertain. Convinced that their life stories, shaped by external forces, are cast in stone, they feel destined to follow the path laid out before them. Whether due to the simplicity of the known or the perceived difficulty of venturing into the unknown, they grapple with the choice of staying the course or forging a different path.

 “You can’t even dream a whole dream, can you?” - Mary Lamb

Fortunately, as each character confronts this challenge, a conflict strategically placed in their path, they find themselves compelled to question their deeply held beliefs and reconsider the entirety of their life's narrative. This pivotal moment enables them to undergo profound transformations, striving for personal growth and improved connections with others. They summon the courage to undertake endeavors they hadn't dared to dream of before, relinquishing the security that currently shields them but will ultimately prove unsatisfactory. Whether the outcome proves to be a positive or negative shift remains uncertain, but what is certain is that, regardless of the conclusion of their individual stories, they will find contentment in the knowledge that their choices were self-determined, untethered from societal expectations, professional obligations, or ancestral precedents.