Why we've been rooting for The Holdovers

We at Teddy like "The Holdovers" very much, so much so that we considered it the true winner of this year’s Academy Awards, at least in our personal ranking.  And it seems we're not the only ones to like it.  Maybe it is for its ability to tell the story of overcoming generational incommunicability, as Vanity Fair writes about, according to which "completely different worlds manage to dialogue with each other, to understand each other and turn this common heritage into such a strong bond that it becomes not indissoluble". Or maybe for that feeling of being watching at a feelgood movie, as Gwilym Mumford describes it in the Guardian. It may be also true that the Academy prefers to award films that are grandiloquent and with a background of hardness and pessimism that certainly do not belong to the film shot by Payne.  "The Holdovers" rather manages to make us discover things that we would not have imagined, more in line with the sensations given by "Perfect Days" by Wim Wenders than with the atomic explosions of Nolan in his "Oppenheimer".

“The Holdovers” is a film that is able to tell, in a gentle way, the story of overcoming differences and incommunicability. The setting is a New England school, the Barton Academy, in 1970, a school that really exists but that in the film is portrayed using different locations in Massachusetts.  At the school, Paul Hunham, played by the Oscar nominee for best actor Paul Giamatti, is an unpopular yet nice (at least if you are not a student) Classical Humanities Teacher. Due to a small scam by a colleague, he finds himself supervising a group of young students who have to stay at the school during the Christmas holidays.  Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) also joins them at the last minute, a more than smart but problematic student with whom Hunham initially has a conflicting and difficult relationship.  The film masterfully relies on the performances of the two actors, to which is added the interpretation - which was rightfully awarded an Oscar - of Da'Vine Joy Randolph who in the film plays Mary Lamb, the cook of the school who recently lost her son in Vietnam and who, like the other two, has to stay at the school.

It is peculiar, and we can think of it as an absolutely deliberate choice, that the story grows around the theme of getting stuck. The three main characters, for different reasons that go from mourning to resentment, passing through anger and helplessness, suddenly find themselves alone on the days of the year when "no one should ever be alone".  However, they share a difficult but precious feeling such as pain. The days between those before December 25th and the beginning of January tell us the story of fragile human beings, who in those days will be able to discover a lot about each other. It is precisely by sharing and becoming aware of their respective pain that the three manage to discover that they have much more in common than they thought.

This is how we discover, a little bit at a time - small spoiler alert, stop if you have not yet seen the film! – that Professor Hunham's hardness and alcoholism are nothing more than the result of a resentment towards the mistakes made during his youth, the same life moment young Angus is living, who already shares a series of personal pains and failures with the professor (he was, for example, expelled from several schools and risks ending up in a military academy) that make him much closer to his teacher than he believes.  It is interesting to note that, as days, pass, what seems to be an absolutely conflictual relationship changes and becomes a kind of story between a young student and his mentor.  A mentor who in this case departs slightly from the characters of Greek mythology, to play the role of a more modern advisor capable of showing the arrogant and angry Angus how life can always offer a second chance.  And to do it, Professor Hunham will stage an equally modern act of sacrifice, which can teach the boy much more than the books he himself recommends and gives out.

As a consequence, learning about the illness of Angus' father helps Professor Hunham to discover the world in which the boy has grown up: from the torment due to the distance of the father figure, to the difficult relationship with a mother who seems to push him away so as not to see into his eyes the pain of a relationship - that with her psychotic father - that marked her life.  The two protagonists dance in a dance made of jokes, smiles, teachings and sweet-bitter melancholy.  Thanks also to the acceptance of her own grief by the cook Mary Lamb, to her ability not to let herself be overwhelmed by mourning, the film gently flows towards an ending that leaves room to the hope of a second chance. To a new relationship of trust with life's opportunities.

"The Holdovers" has the increasingly rarer ability to tell stories of human trust, where opening up to the other and advising them without being judgmental becomes a rare quality increasingly harder to find. There is the story of a man who, despite his youth misadventures, loves his job to the point of sacrificing it in order to save a student whose fragility and pain he has already experienced. There is a cook, seemingly hard and inscrutable, who uses the kitchen to give relief to others and who hides under an ostensible armor the sweetness of those who know the sense of loss. We loved it because it was authentic, full of realism and capable, as few other films, of speaking to the soul of the audience, resonating with their the inner chords. It is a film that talks about enrichment and growth, of a job that when done with love and passion can change people's lives, exactly as we imagine ours to do too.