Alexandre Payne’s The Holdovers is set in 1970s New England, focusing on unorthodox family dynamics during Christmas time. Angus (Dominic Sessa), a student, is left by his parents at his prestigious all-male boarding school for winter break. He is to be cared for by his lonely, nowhere-else-to-be, universally disliked teacher, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti). The Holy Trinity is fulfilled by the school’s chef Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who has just lost her son in the Vietnam War and prefers to stay at the school during the holidays. 

The film largely has no plotline, so inherently we are just hanging out with the characters during their Christmas break. This is not to say that it is a bad thing, because the movie is actually very beautiful and the shots of the large snow fields directly remind me of Fargo (1996). 

The indoors of the school are also strangely inviting and warm. Having done my share of attending boarding school on the East Coast, I can attest that the production designer, Ryan Warren Smith, was on point with how the infirmary, chapel and classrooms looked. The set design had it down to the colors of the bathroom tiles. It was almost like walking down memory lane. 

The movie falls short because of its predictable character arcs and cliché dialogues. The lonesome teacher learns that he can’t project his failures and anger on his students. Paul, of course, learns this from Mary, whose son he taught before he passed. The troubled teenager, Angus, has formed a beautiful friendship with the hated teacher, obviously. He gains a father figure and the teacher has the son he never had. To make this banality even more unbearable, it is filled with Paul spitting phrases in Latin in all kinds of inappropriate situations. This is to criticize the film without even bringing in the allegations of a plagiarized script. 

People are celebrating The Holdovers as another addition to the Christmas movie repertoire, but I have to argue that it is just too sad–and not It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) sad, where the character finds hope in the face of challenges and has a Christmas miracle. The Holdovers is Sylvia Plath’s sad. Despite having a resolution and a  “good ending,” there is this underlying despair radiating from the characters where I am not sure that it’s going to be okay for them. 

The Holdovers tries to be an off-beat comedy with dramatic elements, but the characters have to deal with grief, loneliness, absent parents, failure, racism, the Vietnam War, and schizophrenia. As a result, it turns into little more than a chilling tragedy.