Vibe
The Holdovers is a Christmas film about the people who do not get to leave. Set at a New England boarding school during the 1970 Christmas break, it strands three very different people together: Paul Hunham, a caustic classics teacher; Angus Tully, a bright and volatile student whose mother chooses a honeymoon over bringing him home; and Mary Lamb, the school cook grieving a son killed in Vietnam. The premise initially suggests an odd-couple comedy, but Alexander Payne and screenwriter David Hemingson steadily widen it into a story about class, grief, abandonment, and the forms of care people perform when conventional family structures fail them. Snowbound dormitories, empty corridors, institutional meals, a modest Christmas tree, and an improvised holiday excursion create seasonal atmosphere without turning hardship into picturesque decoration. Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph build the film through accumulated friction rather than instant affection. The period style is more than nostalgia: the simulated 1970s texture, music, and production design make the film feel discovered rather than newly manufactured. Christmas matters because it exposes absence. The characters become visible to one another precisely because everyone else has gone home.
Watch for
- The deliberately aged visual texture and period-specific framing choices.
- How meals—bad school food, a Christmas dinner, restaurant stops—track changes in intimacy.
- Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s Mary, whose grief prevents the film from turning the holiday into easy healing.
- The gradual transformation of Paul and Angus from mutual irritation to recognition without sentimental shortcuts.
Production notes
Focus Features identifies The Holdovers as a 134-minute comedy-drama directed by Alexander Payne from David Hemingson’s screenplay, starring Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph, and newcomer Dominic Sessa. The company began its 2023 U.S. rollout in late October before expanding in November. Sight and Sound notes that the production intentionally evokes mid-budget American films of the early 1970s. Cinematographer Eigil Bryld shot digitally, but the image was manipulated to suggest the grain, wear, color response, and optical character of period film prints; vintage-style studio idents, fades, and zooms reinforce the illusion. The story was inspired in part by Marcel Pagnol’s Merlusse, though Hemingson relocated the basic situation into an American prep-school world tied to his own familiarity with that environment. The period setting also places Mary’s loss within the Vietnam War and makes class privilege at Barton Academy materially important. Rather than using Christmas as glossy production design, the movie builds its season from cold interiors, depleted school routines, and the contrast between those who can leave and those who cannot.
Trivia
- David Hemingson’s screenplay was his first produced feature screenplay.
- The story takes place over Christmas break in 1970.
- Dominic Sessa made his feature-film acting debut as Angus.
- The digital cinematography was intentionally processed and designed to resemble a 1970s film print.
- Da’Vine Joy Randolph won the Academy Award for supporting actress for her performance as Mary Lamb.
Legacy
The Holdovers entered Christmas-film conversation unusually quickly for a new release because it felt less like a seasonal product than a film that happened to discover the holiday’s dramatic potential. Its early legacy rests on three linked achievements. First, it revived a kind of literate, actor-centered American comedy-drama often associated with the 1970s, and did so through craft choices that were visible without becoming mere pastiche. Second, it gave Christmas cinema a contemporary story of chosen family built around grief, class, and abandonment rather than romance or Santa mythology. Third, its performances immediately acquired awards and critical stature, particularly Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s portrayal of Mary. BFI and Sight and Sound treated the film as both a significant 2023 work and a plausible future Christmas perennial. That distinction matters: its seasonal status is not based on a marketing hook alone but on the way Christmas break creates the central social condition of the story. The film is still too recent to have the decades of ritual attached to older titles, yet its combination of craft, emotional complexity, and rewatchable warmth already places it in serious dialogue with established holiday classics.