One of my favorite moments in the Harry Potter books was how, almost ever winter break, Harry stayed behind at Hogwarts. While most students went home for the holidays, a handful of students, faculty, and staff remained on school grounds—each for various reasons, with Harry staying because there was no (loving) home to celebrate Christmas. These holdovers, comprised of mostly oddballs, encountered rare intimate moments with one another, interacting in ways that couldn’t happen on a regular day. Because most of the time, these chapters were insignificant to the plot, I understood why directors cut them in adaptations. However, now we get to see a glimpse of a similar premise in Alexander Payne’s upcoming holiday dramedy The Holdovers.
Written by David Hemingson, The Holdovers brings together a detested private school teacher (Paul Giamatti), a grieving campus cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), and a student on the brink of expulsion (Dominic Sessa) over one such holiday break. While they’ve likely crossed paths before, it’s probably never been anything close to this. The forced proximity, swirled in with holiday blues and anxiety, is a recipe for disaster and extreme vulnerability.
I know Giamatti is going to kill this role, and that Sessa’s character will annoy me until he doesn’t. However, I’m most interested in Randolph as the mother of a Black boy killed after a Vietnam draft, working around people who got class exceptions from the war. As the only Black woman and working-class person of the three, a lot could go wrong writing-wise, but I’m remaining hopeful.
Maybe it’s the film’s graininess or the New England backdrop, but even with the hardship faced by the leads, there’s something almost romantic (in a literary sense) about roaming the halls of educational institutions while nearly everyone is gone—about having mature conversations with people much older, and wiser than you. However, the boundaries there are fuzzy because it’s outside of instructional hours, and the holidays don’t need more stress. Maybe it’s just me with my personality that’s both very optimistic and felt most comfortable at school. (I was a kid, and then an adult, in all the organizations from band to student council.)
The Holdovers looks to focus on some of their hardships and privileges. After all, two of the three leads are white men in a 1970s setting. However, this situation, while punishment for at least two of them, is a reality for many students, not just students attending elite private schools in the Northeast. Scholarship students and international students frequently can’t afford the travel expenses for such a short break. While only a fraction of students will consider themselves homeless, 14-20% of college students experience homelessness. This includes community college students, and each group also faces food insecurity. Each of these hardships and more affect one’s ability to learn, study, and research.
In the very old money halls and despite a slight pep in the trailer, there’s a glimpse of this struggle in the story. However, it also doesn’t appear to take away from these moments where misfits find time to bond over being dealt a crappy hand.
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the work being covered here wouldn’t exist.
(featured image: Focus Features)
