The Holdovers (2023). Courtesy Focus Features.
Barton Academy has cleared out for Christmas, but Paul Hunham is still there. The classics teacher in The Holdovers knows how to make a classroom uncomfortable. Looking after a stranded student over the holidays gives him a different problem: there is very little room left to hide behind his job.
Alexander Payne's 2023 film brings Paul, played by Paul Giamatti, together with Angus Tully, played by Dominic Sessa, and the school's cook Mary Lamb, played by Da'Vine Joy Randolph. It is December 1970. Angus has been left at school after his family changes its plans; Mary is grieving her son, who died in Vietnam. The holiday keeps putting other people's ideas of family and celebration in front of them.
Their surroundings look as though they have been waiting for years. Production designer Ryan Warren Smith told Focus Features that his team studied old school yearbooks and chose objects that could already have been a decade old in 1970. Barton's buildings came from five different schools. Paul's office is crowded with unfinished work and personal clutter, down to socks drying on a radiator. The place gives his isolation a daily routine.
Screenwriter David Hemingson knew that school environment from his years at Watkinson in Hartford. Speaking with the National Board of Review in 2024, he traced part of Paul's personality to his uncle Robert Hale, a World War II veteran, and connected Mary's emotional generosity to his mother, a nurse. The characters' difficult edges sit alongside habits of care he had observed in people close to him.
Payne also explained in that conversation why the film reduces its initial group of students to just Angus. Keeping a larger group would have made it another sort of school story. With three people, an awkward dinner or an unexpected outing can change the balance of the whole film. Each has time to notice when somebody else is avoiding a question.
That is where its warmth comes from. Paul and Angus can irritate each other and still recognize the embarrassment of being left behind. Mary has losses neither of them can repair, and Randolph gives her space to be funny, tired or unwilling to explain herself. Their holiday contains temporary pleasures and conversations that go badly. By staying with those moments, The Holdovers makes their eventual concern for one another feel earned.
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