****/****
starring Paul Giamatti, Da’vine Joy Randolph, Dominic Sessa, Carrie Preston
written by David Hemingson
directed by Alexander Payne
by Walter Chaw It was never like this, but it’s how I remember it: snow on the ground, ice in patches, a well-appointed office wall-to-wall with books, a fireplace, and me and a classmate, a dear friend, doing an independent study with my favourite professor. I have looked my whole life for my people. I think sometimes they are the fragments I shore against my ruins, that thing T.S. Eliot said to describe the whole of Western civilization informing his writing–but thinking of them as fragments seems wrong. Just as how their spark in my life is not the holding me up but the giving me a reason to want to persist. It would be so much easier not to. I saw an old friend the other day, and he told a story about how I said something to him once that aided him when he was at his lowest point. I didn’t remember saying it, though I remembered the feeling of fear I had for him at the time and was moved to tears that I had helped him as he had so often helped me. You can’t really know the wake you leave behind as you go. My favourite poem is William Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”, particularly for how it speaks of the “best portion of a man’s life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love.” This line has meant different things to me at different times in my life. I wonder what it means to me now.
Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is a film, like Curtis Hanson’s Wonder Boys, that exists in the specific time and place in my mind where I was the saddest, a place I couldn’t wait to leave and to which I wish, with all my heart, to return. Nostalgia is an addictive illness; that’s just one of its peculiarities. I have everything I ever wanted–and still, there’s this pull to a period in my life where nothing was certain for me, when I had done nothing, accomplished nothing. I was so miserable and lonesome, although I had a mentor who believed in me and friends who were worried about me, and I was in the act of becoming who I was going to be. I had potential then. I don’t have that anymore. I miss it. In The Holdovers, Mr. Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is a teacher of classics at exclusive prep school Barton Academy. His hands sweat too much and he smells of fish and everyone thinks he’s an asshole. He certainly appears to be. They call him “walleye” because he has a lazy eye; they are vicious to Mr. Hunham, and, in return, he gives his students the grades they deserve. For the crime of fairness, Mr. Hunham is sentenced to spend the holiday break with the “holdovers,” those whose families aren’t taking them back, so they must stay there to burden Mr. Hunham with their company. It’s like a John Irving novel, but these are even less Princes of Maine and Kings of New England.
An act of good fortune springs all but one of the boys a couple of days in. The remaining holdover is spindly, angry, potentially brilliant Angus (Dominic Sessa), whose resentful mother (Gillian Vigman) and new stepfather (Tate Donovan) are unreachable when their permission is needed to free him. We share his frustration. It’s all terribly unfair. For the last ten days or so of Mr. Hunham’s oubliette in empty Barton, it’s just him, Angus, and cafeteria lady Mary (Da’vine Joy Randolph), who actually has somewhere to go but is so broken by the death of her son in Vietnam that she’s frozen in place. They’re all frozen in place. The first thing The Holdovers is about is escape: from any number of proximate things, of course, but ultimately from the pasts that suspend this trio in various states of arrest. It is a film that holds a totemic, fetishistic sway over me because it draws a line directly from me now to me then, floated on tenterhooks to the frame of my life. And it is about the tethers that tie Mr. Hunham, Angus, and Mary to the things they’ve lost that they can never recover. There is an irresolvable irony there I can’t begin to unravel. I can’t even find a finger-hold in a surface that shifts underneath me, as I am now more Mr. Hunham than Angus: a professor, swallowed by self-loathing, finished without the sense to lie down. But this is what I know: The Holdovers, whatever its prickliness and depictions of the little cruelties of adolescence and well-past-middle-age, is generous, observant, and eminently kind. It says that however late it is, there is still time to make a difference in a kid’s life. There’s still time.
Mr. Hunham’s pretty colleague, Ms. Crane (Carrie Preston), invites him to her annual Christmas party, and after some goading, he calls it a “field trip” and packs Angus and Mary into his car. He gets a peck on the cheek under the mistletoe from Ms. Crane and, still flushed, tells her that he teaches because he “wanted to make a difference. I used to think I could prepare them for the world, even a little. Provide standards and grounding… But the world doesn’t make sense anymore.” He’s on that roll where we fit our needle into our favourite groove: “The rich don’t give a shit, poor kids are cannon fodder. Integrity is a punchline. Trust is just a name on a bank.” She says that if everything he says is true, “Now is when they need someone like you.” It’s a gut-punch, one of a bouquet of them sprinkled throughout the picture. Payne ends Mr. Hunham’s nice moment with a record scratch–a literal one, as Mary tries to find a track on an Artie Shaw record that her dead son used to love. She makes a bit of an ass of herself. She drinks too much. In the other room, Mr. Hunham learns that Ms. Crane’s kindness is the kind a beautiful woman shows to someone she could never imagine as a romantic partner. It’s not false; it’s horrible in its purity. And in a matter of a few seconds of screentime, Payne absolutely lays me to waste. It comes at about the halfway point of the movie, and the rest will be either a misery exhibition or the first inklings of an escape route for these people who deserve more than the shackles and anchors dragging behind them at the bottom of their ocean. One way becomes like how a few of Payne’s other films become: mean, mocking. The other leads to a rare and gratifying humanism.
The ways we hurt each other are detailed so sharply in The Holdovers: Angus’s childish barbs masquerading as questions (“You’ve never had sex, have you?” and, “Which eye should I look at–all the kids wonder, you know?”); Mr. Hunham’s wielding of whatever institutional power he has, however slight, to maintain an illusion of control; Mary’s tippling, which only acidifies her broadsides, even as it’s meant to blunt the violence of her mourning. The ways we come together are depicted just as elegantly. Angus coerces Mr. Hunham into letting him visit his birth father (Stephen Thorne), who he’d claimed to be dead, in the asylum where he’s been committed. As the father is led in, groggy and uncertain, he spots Angus and calls him “sweetheart.” I thought the cruel gag would be that his father has mistaken him for someone else. It would be an easy rug-pull, as well as the variety of punchline I think of Payne making in films like About Schmidt (which I liked overall) and, especially, a movie that mistakes its high concept for deep thought, downsizing (which I didn’t like it at all). But no, Angus’s father does recognize him and calls his big son “sweetheart,” and I’m devastated again. It was never like this, but it’s how I remember it: The ideas flowed cleanly and honestly, and I was inspired and believed for the only and last time in my life that I might be special in the ways I suspected I was special, and seen for all my imperfections both obvious and secret and nevertheless found worthy in the balance. Mr. Hunham saves Angus in the end from institutional bureaucracies and pressures put upon him by Angus’s angry parents. He doesn’t tell Angus about what he sacrifices for him, but he does tell him which eye to look at when Angus is speaking to him. This is Mr. Hunham rediscovering his dignity and purpose, and it is Payne delivering his masterpiece the eighth time out with a film that is very simply about the possibility you get more than one chance to be important in someone else’s life–and how that is, in the end, all in all.
