(courtesy IMP Awards)
You only have to be alive and in the thick of life for a very short time to realise that at any given time, our lives balance on a wafer thin ledge between bracing hope and searing reality.
We obviously want to believe we will tip over into the bounty and wonder of hope fulfilled, but all too often we fall, without any safety net or ability to change the dire course of events, onto the other side of the existential equation and find ourselves lost in a place we never thought we’d be.
It’s debilitating and depressing and crawling back out from this abyss takes mighty effort and a heady exertion of will, things that we can’t do on our own much of the time and which take the archetypal village to make real.
The truth of this is beautifully brought to evocative life by director Alexander Payne in The Holdovers, a 1970-set film that not only looks the part but which brings forth the hope and the despair of a decade which is yet to be realised but which remains mired in the messy aftermath of the 1960s.
The film centres on three quite different people, all of whom are left behind New England boarding school, Barton Academy, which caters to the sons of America’s wealthy and privileged elite.
The first, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is a teacher of classical history, a grumpy, taciturn man who is loathed by students for his uncompromising approach to teaching and grading, and by his peers who treat the socially awkward pariah as something of a weird joke, a man to be avoided and mocked.
He draws the short straw Christmas 1970 when another teacher lies about the health of his mother, and ends looking after five boys, one of whom, Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), is left behind when the other four students are offered the chance to go skiing with one of the kids’ dad, and only Tully’s parents can’t be reached to give their permission.
Tully is a bright and incredibly capable young man but crushed by the grief of personal trauma to do with dad, and his mother’s remarriage, he is caustic and scornful of his classmates and angry that not only does his mother not want him home for Christmas but that he now can’t join the other guys, with whom he somewhat bonds in the short time they’re together, and he’s stuck with his rules-obsessed teacher and the head of catering for the school, Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph in a remarkably touching performance.
She is weighed down by the death of her only son in Vietnam, mourning not only his company but the promise he held of a life far better believed and better educated than her own, and like Hunham and Tully in their own ways, she is lost, unable to see a way forward and while not as resentful as her two Christmas inmates, unsure where to go next or if there’s even a next to go to.
These three thoroughly disparate souls might seem like the weirdest of all combinations to spend Christmas together, and in the first third of The Holdovers you would be right with none of them really meeting in a collegial space, or at least one that involves even a small amount of intimacy.
But as the fortnight draws on, and Mary and Angus bond over TV program The Newlywed Game, and Tully and Hunham come to appreciate they may have more in common than either realises, it becomes apparent that, different though they may be, all three share a loss of faith in themselves and life and are equally at sea when it comes to where they should go next.
They are, in effect, treading water, painfully, sadly and alone, and The Holdovers rather wonderfully but with a keen eye on the cold, hard realities of life, what can happen when barriers come down and people allow their lives to intertwine.
It’s not all bowling and beer – at one point when Hunham and Tully have bonded to a significant degree, they head to Boston at Tully’s request and end up at a bowling alley – and The Holdovers doesn’t pretend for a second that it is, giving these three aimless people a sense of family and belonging but anchoring in the stark reality that life always gives and takes and that happy endings always come in unequal doses and rarely free from flaws.
The quiet unalloyed beauty of The Holdovers is the way in which it tells its affectingly thoughtful story in understated and measured tones.
There’s a lot going on in-between all the quiet conversations and nuanced scenes with the film content to take its time narratively and visually – full marks to cinematographer Eigil Bryld who brings melancholy and beauty in equal measure to everything from snow-covered school grounds to long hallways and empty rooms and stairwells – and to let pain dwell in the same space as nascent hope and connection.
The two extremes are treated authentically as part of the same whole, and it’s a credit to Payne that he balances the emotionally big and small moments and allow them both to breathe, presenting us with life in all its contradictory glory and helping us to gain access to the lives of the film’s characters who, like all of us, dwell in light and dark simultaneously.
Throughout The Holdovers, which is sumptuously beautiful in almost every sense and quietly moving in ways that burrow into your heart and soul so profoundly and yet unobtrusively (there’s not a gram of emotional manipulation or mawkish sentimentality to be had) that you don’t realise how much it’s affected until the credits roll, you are treated to life as it coldly and cruelly is, but also as it could be if people would open up again, take chances and see life less as a threat than a renewed possibility.
That shift happens for all three characters but not in the way you’d expect, and that’s proof of how well this film navigates its weighty subject matter, allowing its characters to see the very worst of life but also to see again that the very best also beckons and may, their pain and disappointment aside, be closer than they think.
Behind the scenes …