The Holdovers Film Review

The last really great film I watched was Saltburn which was shockingly unique and often simply shocking. I remember when sitting down to watch Saltburn there was a trailer for The Holdovers and I made a mental note that this film was just my cup of tea. 

Nobody likes teacher Paul Hunham who is fantastically played by Paul Giamatti. Not his students, not his fellow faculty, not the headmaster, who all find his pomposity and rigidity exasperating.

With no family and nowhere to go over Christmas holiday in 1970 and having ruffled a few feathers by giving the child of a rich benefactor poor grades, Paul is ordered to be given the short straw and remains at school to supervise students unable to journey home.

After a few days, only one student holdover remains — a trouble-making 18-year-old named Angus, a good student whose bad behaviour always threatens to get him expelled. He is ably played by Dominic Sessa.

Joining Paul and Angus is head cook Mary (Randolph)-an African American woman who caters to sons of privilege and whose own son was recently lost in Vietnam. These three very different shipwrecked people form an unlikely Christmas family sharing comic misadventures during two very snowy weeks in New England. The real journey is how they help one another understand that they are not beholden to their past-they can choose their own futures.

I simply adore The Holdovers. This is a proper film with actors who just act and nothing more, except perhaps good if traditional storyline.

The films setting is in 1970 is incredibly authentic to me as someone admittedly born a few days before the end of 1973. However remembering 1976 very well albeit from a childs point of view, it all seems just as it should. Like Saltburn, the film is shown in a non-standard ratio just as it would have been if it has been made and aired in 1970.

Maybe as I am always alone every Christmas and also obviously love my history but this was a very relatable film and I really liked Paul Giamatti in this film. He’s such a great actor and you can just see how flabbergasted his character is that his talents are all but wasted on rich students who have no interest at all in being taught anything.

All the characters have a great backstory and they aren’t ones that you’d necessarily guess. Even the spoilt student Angus has a great character arc and I stopped hating him about the same time as his teacher did.

And college cook Mary is just a wonderful character and portrayed so well by Da’Vine Joy Randolph. All of these characters are just so real and how they’d have actually been in the 70’s and even though it is not at all a comedy, some of the lines made a lot of people in the audience laugh with the cook and teachers status of the students.

There are no character redemptions as despite how the film starts off, no-one needs redeeming here. What there is satisfying progress with everyone learning from each other, changing for the better and hopefully making the best of their lives such as they are.

If Indiana Jones is who I’d like to be, this professor is likely pretty much who I am.