Note: this post contains spoilers.
A pedantic ex-boyfriend once told me that the strongest stories—or the best constructed ones—are those where viewers can get a sense of the world-at-large. What he meant is that whether the story focuses on a small village or a fishing boat or a lost island, there needs to be sense of extension of the world beyond the small slice viewers are granted access to. I’ve spent time thinking about this, because it’s true that there are rules established in a cinematic universe, and the rules of the slice viewers see need to some degree exist as contrary to or in complement with or in parallel to the rules of whatever exists beyond it—whether the work is science fiction or a biopic. Without this, there is no anchor. In Alien, despite occurring entirely in space, the spaceship represents civilization and outside it, the inhuman, and as it follows, the inhuman breaks into the “civilized” world and contaminates it. Rules are determined from the outset which serve to help the viewers make sense of what they are seeing, to contextualize the action, and to understand the degree and effect of what unfolds. In The Shining, flashbacks and flashpresents are scattered throughout which help to show true and total isolation and put into relief the stark ending. Movies can use any manner of technique to show the universe of its characters. That’s not say these techniques are effective (Nocturnal Animals being one example, focusing too much on craft, La La Land another, hinging too much on its choreography, or Annihilation, which I actually love, but which gets lost in its own imagery—point being that often when a director focuses too much on one element, they can lose sight of the whole, or if the telos is too overwhelming, it’ll all look like puppetry).
The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s latest, is a movie that exemplifies the consequences of establishing a place in relation to a world, and how venturing out into this world without true direction can upend a film’s careful construction.
In broad strokes, the movie takes place at a New England boarding school and follows Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a crabby, old trout of a teacher and his impervious pupil Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa) as the two are forced to stay at their boarding school Barton over the holidays; Paul because someone needs to watch over the kids who cannot return home, and Angus because his mother has at the last minute abandoned him to go on holiday with her new husband. In the Bildungsroman narrative that follows, the two, in their near isolation, are forced to confront their past and present. A notable character that accompanies them on this journey is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the cafeteria administrator, who also stays at Barton over the winter holiday, and is in mourning for her son who recently died in the Vietnam War.
Richard Brody of the New Yorker describes the film as sanitized because it does not find ways to incorporate the very real historical context of the time, such as virulent anti-Vietnam war sentiment, and so on. For Brody, this is to both maintain nostalgia (one of the easiest moods to breakdown if faced with anything contrary) and also to make a point about Payne’s own life (the accusation that he committed statutory rape and his subsequent denial and its dismissal, Brody states as if to drive to the point of this time “when personal matters stayed private”). It is sanitized and aims to sanitize.
This could well be.
However, the first point is well worth addressing because there is often the sense that “reality” needs to be imbued into a film that aims to depict “reality.” Historical context is not merely an element that should/can be integrated into a story, but one that needs to make sense from a thematic standpoint. Payne picks and chooses what is included within the narrative, as Brody points out, the Vietnam War is motioned to, but the generalized sentiment of the time is not adequately—or at all—evoked. I would like to take some time below to consider the world that is created in the film and how it is broken down, and ultimately as I see it, how it fails, but not for the reasons Brody ascribes.
The Holdovers flounders. The first two-thirds are strong. The dialogue is clever, funny. The character swiftly and deftly sketched out. The ease of the film—its flow and pacing and lightness, even in the darker moments, falls by the wayside when Paul, Angus, and Mary leave the boarding school for Boston, about two-thirds of the way through. What had been cliché and cute becomes cliché and hackneyed.
Before leaving for Boston, the story took place nearly entirely at Barton. Picture the world of Holden Caulfield, but this time from the perspective of one of his maddened teachers. The first few establishing scenes show where the characters live and sleep and work. These wood-paneled, low-ceiling rooms where the brains can think or where the bodies can roughouse. Outside, there is snow. A white and blanketed landscape of white, as far as the eye can see. At this remote boarding school, life is teeming. The world that is beyond it is just a backdrop. In their privilege, the boys can look away, their main focus on present fun and future admittance to their next elite bubble, the Princetons, Cornells, Dartmouths. In this closed world that Payne creates, viewers are invited to bask in nostalgia, witnesses to another time. Brief hiccups of discomfort—like when viewers are introduced to Mary and her heartbreaking story—only really function as foils to the privilege these boys benefit from.
However, some students do not have the luxury of returning home for the holidays—and these boys are the holdovers. These are the outcasts of sorts, the ones who do not participate in the mass holiday exodus from Barton.
The outside world exists in the film—exhibited by a frustrated donor whose son doesn’t get into Princeton because of an F he received, by the Vietnam war seeping in, by the mention of difference and conflict, from the trivial to the non-trivial. But all of these things are a backdrop to the activities of the boarding school which plugs along with its traditions. Given what he has established, Alexander Payne can load the film with every cliché imaginable without putting the audience off—they can indeed be sincere and heartfelt because in this world they are not clichés, they are the reality.
The movie veers off course when the trio head to Boston. Here all sorts of unlikely adventures unfold. A chance encounter between Paul and an old schoolmate from Harvard, that is as ridiculous as it is funny. A scene at an asylum—as if McClean needs to make its way into half of all movies filmed in or about Boston—featuring an absurdly simple and sterilized interaction between a paranoid father and his bereft son. Upon returning to campus, Paul and Angus have been forever changed, each having learned the truth about one another. And so, Paul gives up his career to save the boy’s trajectory, and the boy is ready to begin afresh and the two cry. The ending unfolds like the plot of a Disney movie. The lesson is clear.
Payne flounders outside the four walls of the institution where the rules of the narrative were established. In Boston, every action that might be charming and endearing at Barton, funny and uproarious, sad or pitiful, is cast in a new light. Like a well-made clock, these interactions and what they elicit work within their context, but beyond it they lose themselves and become absurd and saccharine.
The trip to Boston is a deux ex machina. It’s a shame as it was not necessary. Subtly, a shift was occurring prior to this excursion. For instance, Paul went out and purchased a Christmas tree and prepared some presents for Angus and Mary. Or we see Angus quietly reading as Mary and Paul talk, a peaceful activity we hadn’t seen him do before. These changes feel natural because they feel inevitable: the isolation of the two at the school, the two being forced to spend time together, to learn from each other, the party they attend off campus where other characters put into relief their relationship, its strengths and weaknesses.
I very much enjoyed the Holdovers. It’s a shame that the film couldn't hold its own all the way through; fact is, Payne did not need to do so much. Maybe Brody is right that Payne was trying to articulate something extradiegetic about his own life. I don’t know. But what is apparent is that something outside of the established boarding school universe seeped in. In the swift action and movement of the last third of the film, the movie is paradoxically stunned; the telos of the film overwhelms it. The outside world, cleverly established at the outset of the film, results in an unintended mockery of the boarding school, one that Payne certainly did not intend.
Be careful when crossing the River Styx.