Bristol Everyman
Another week, another private school. The Holdovers begins with an extremely sweet choir singing Oh Little Town of Bethlehem in improbably perfect harmony. Either choral singing is an especially big deal in American schools, or else everyone still regards The History Boys as the one to beat.There is a pointedly retro title sequence, right down to a British Board of Film Classification "AA" certificate. (I assume it's a different joke in America.) Despite hairstyles, branding, and references to Vietnam, I didn't feel the film was particularly an exercise in late 60s nostalgia: but maybe there was a need to signal "this one is a bit old fashioned" from the start. Or maybe we have to pretend that privileged boarding schools and sarcasm in the classroom are a phenomenon of the Olden Days.
It's a very nice film. It is, however, precisely the very nice film the trailer led you to expect. Two antagonistic characters are trapped
Angus is a deeply obnoxious student. Mr Hunham is a profoundly dislikable classics teacher. At the very last moment, Angus's new stepfather decides that he doesn't want him home for Christmas, meaning he will have to stay at his boarding school throughout the holiday season. (There was an analogy with Ebenezer Scrooge to be drawn here, but thankfully no-one draws it.) Equally at the very last minute, the headmaster decides that Mr Hunham will have to be the teacher who stays in school over the holiday to supervise the kids who are wintering there. The only other person who stays is the cook (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) who has just lost her son in Vietnam. There are normally eight hundred boys at the school, so running the kitchen is quite a big operation.
There are initially four other "holdovers", but they are summarily removed by a lamp-shaded deus ex machina: a very rich dad whisks them all away in his helicopter.
The film does not pivot or change direction at the half way point. Saltburn it definitely is not. Naturally, we find out what has been going on in Angus's life to make him so obstreperous; and a little about Mr Hunham's back-story and how he came to be so embittered. The film hangs on a very witty script: everyone is insulting everyone else all the time, and the barbs are improbably witty. ("But sir, I can't fail this course!" "Don't sell yourself short; I firmly believe you can.") Giamatti and Sessa both give impeccable performances. If the Oscar went for technical acting as opposed to scale and importance, Giamatti would walk away with it, atom bomb or no atom bomb. Both characters are, as English teachers used to say, fully rounded. Hunham may be a bastard who delights in giving boys low marks. But he genuinely loves his subject and is sad because no-one else does. At one point in berates a street-corner Santa Claus with the probable historical facts about Nicholas of Smyrna. He claims that he positively likes being alone with his books, and it is never quite clear who he thinks he is fooling. He has spent his whole career teaching at the school where he was a pupil: he is in fact biggest "holdover" of all. Angus does engage in a little "so's your mum" level teenage rudeness, and self-destructively baits authority figures, but as the details of his life unwind, he comes across as a convincingly damaged but probably redeemable individual.
No-one appears in a Midsummer Night's Dream. No-one stands on their desks. But the inevitable denouement in the principal's study does result in some unexpectedly uplifting self-sacrifice. We aren't left thinking that either character has been changed or saved by the other, but there is some sense that they have gained in self-knowledge. Which, as Mr Hunham would probably have pointed out, is just what Aristotle said ought to happen in a good drama.
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