In December 1970, Paul Hunham is an authoritarian classics professor at Barton Academy, a New Englandboarding school that he once attended on scholarship. His students and fellow teachers despise him for his brutally honest grading and difficult personality. Barton's headmaster, Woodrup, scolds Hunham for having cost the academy an important donor by giving the donor's son a failing grade, which led to the donor's son being rejected from Princeton University.
As punishment, Hunham is forced to supervise the "holdover" students left on campus for the holidays, including Angus Tully, whose mother abruptly cancelled a trip to Saint Kitts to honeymoon with her new husband. Also staying behind is cafeteria administrator Mary Lamb, who is grieving the loss of her son, a Barton alumnus killed serving in the Vietnam War.
To their chagrin, Hunham imposes studying and exercise on the holdovers' break. After six days, the wealthy father of one of them arrives by helicopter and agrees to take all the students on the family's ski trip. Angus, unable to reach his parents for permission, is left alone at Barton with Hunham and Mary. When Hunham catches Angus trying to arrange a hotel room, Angus runs through the school halls while Hunham chases him. Angus defiantly leaps into a pile of gym equipment, dislocating his shoulder. At the hospital, Angus lies to protect Hunham from blame. Hunham later flirts with Lydia Crane, the assistant to the headmaster, after he and Angus encounter her at a restaurant, and she invites the pair to her Christmas Eve party.
On Christmas Eve, Angus, Hunham, Mary, and Barton's janitor, Danny, attend Lydia's party. While Angus hangs out with and kisses Lydia's niece Elise, Hunham is sad to discover that Lydia has a boyfriend, and a drunk Mary has a breakdown over her son's death. Hunham insists on leaving early. While arguing with Hunham, Angus angrily shouts that his father is dead, causing Mary to lambast Hunham for his unsympathetic approach.
Having reflected on his behavior, Hunham puts together a small Christmas celebration, and with Mary's persuasion, grants Angus's wish for a "field trip" to Boston. After dropping Mary off in Roxbury to spend time with her pregnant sister, Angus and Hunham bond over various activities in Boston, including ice skating and a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts. They bump into one of Hunham's classmates from Harvard University, who has become a successful academic. When prompted, Hunham lies about his career, and Angus plays along. Hunham reluctantly confesses to Angus that he was expelled from Harvard after deliberately hitting a colleague, a legacy donor's son who framed him for plagiarism, with a car. After the incident ruined Hunham's career prospects, a connection to a teacher at Barton allowed him to secure a teaching position there.
When Hunham and Angus go to see Little Big Man at the Orpheum Theatre, Angus sneaks away and Hunham catches him entering a taxi. Angus explains he wants to see his father, and Hunham agrees to accompany him, assuming they are going to a cemetery. However, Angus's father is still alive and confined in a psychiatric hospital due to mental health issues and violent outbursts. Following the visit, Angus expresses concern that he will turn out like his father; Hunham comforts him and sincerely declares that Angus has a bright future. They join Mary and Danny to celebrate New Year's Eve.
When school resumes in January 1971, Hunham is summoned by Lydia to Woodrup's office, and finds Angus's mother and stepfather there as well. They tell Hunham that Angus's visit to the hospital was unauthorized and that the snow globe Angus had given his father led to another violent outburst. Angus's mother and stepfather plan to send Angus to military school, but Hunham defends Angus and takes the blame for the trip. While Hunham is subsequently fired, Angus is allowed to stay at Barton.
Mary, who has come to better terms with the loss of her son, gives Hunham a notebook for the monograph he wants to write. Hunham and Angus share a poignant goodbye. Leaving the school, Hunham drinks from a bottle of cognac he stole from Woodrup, then spits some of it out toward the school and drives away.
Paul Giamatti as Paul Hunham, a classics teacher at the Barton Academy boarding school. Hunham (unlike Giamatti) has a lazy eye, although neither the actor nor the crew have revealed how the effect was produced.[4]
Dominic Sessa as Angus Tully, a Barton student left on campus during Christmas break
Filming began in Massachusetts on January 27, 2022.[10][11][12] Location manager Kai Quinlan, who had worked on other New England-set films like Spotlight and Black Mass, drew on her Massachusetts upbringing for the film.[13] For the fictional Barton Academy, five Massachusetts schools were used as locations: Groton, Northfield Mount Hermon, Deerfield Academy, St. Mark's School and Fairhaven High School.[14] Dominic Sessa, in his first film role as Angus, attended Deerfield in the class of 2022.[15] The film also shot at the historic Somerville and Orpheum theatres, and on the Boston Common. Payne later said that capturing the 1970s aesthetic was relatively easy because "change comes slowly to New England".[16]
A special screening of the film was held for buyers on September 11, 2022. The next day, it was reported that Focus Features had acquired distribution rights for $30 million.[18] The film was scheduled for a limited theatrical release on November 10, 2023, followed by wide release on November 22.[19] However, it was pushed up to a limited release on October 27, followed by a wide release on November 10.[20] It is scheduled for release in the United Kingdom by Universal Pictures UK on January 19, 2024.[1]
The Holdovers was released on digital platforms on November 30, 2023, followed by a Blu-ray and DVD release on January 2, 2024.[26]
Reception
Box office
The film made $211,093 from six theaters in its opening weekend, an average of $35,082 per venue.[27] It expanded to 64 theaters in its second weekend, making $599,833.[28] It then made $3.2 million from 778 theaters in its third weekend.[29] Continuing to expand, it made $2.7 million in both its fourth and fifth weekends.[30][31]
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 96% of 302 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 8.5/10. The website's consensus reads: "Beautifully bittersweet, The Holdovers marks a satisfying return to form for director Alexander Payne."[32]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 82 out of 100, based on 56 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[33] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale, while those polled by PostTrak gave it an 80% overall positive score.[31]
Reviews in The Boston Globe and Boston.com both praised the film's 1970s New England setting.[37][38]Ann Hornaday of The Washington Post wrote that it "doesn't only have the look and feel of that time period, it resuscitates the finest elements of its narrative traditions".[39]Richard Brody, writing for The New Yorker, described The Holdovers as "a pile of clichés", but one realized "with such loving immediacy that it feels as if Payne were discovering them for himself". Brody was more critical of the time period, arguing that the "hermetically sealed, historically reduced drama" ignored the politically fraught setting of the 1970s.[40] Nonetheless, Michael Schulman, another writer for The New Yorker, included Giamatti, Sessa and Randolph in his list of the year's best performances, and considered the latter "in a prime position for the Best Supporting Actress race."[41]
Justin Chang of the Los Angeles Times praised the film's "enveloping sense of time and place", but as a whole, criticized it as "a flat, phony, painfully diagrammatic movie masquerading as a compassionate, humane one." Chang said that Mary Lamb, despite Randolph's affecting performance, was "somehow the movie's most under-developed role."[36]
Filmmaker James Gray praised the film, saying "The film takes place in 1970, the first year of American history's greatest hangover. And the rhythms and look, precisely rendered, lend a bracing authenticity to the proceedings. More important, the movie recalls vividly both that era's glorious dreams and the stinging cost of idealism. These lonely souls may seem doomed, but they're still trying. And though bearing witness may not always be pretty, it is beautiful. So is The Holdovers."[42]
.jpg)
