An Instant Christmas Classic

The Holdovers does exactly what a movie should do.

Good morning.

It’s a rare thing to be sitting in a movie theater, actively watching a movie for the first time, and realizing as you are watching that you are watching a movie that you’ll come back to over and over again. It’s a rare thing for me at least. But that’s what happened when I saw The Holdovers, Alexander Payne’s latest movie, last week. 

According to my light Googling, The Holdovers has been included on a few “best of” lists for the year. It’s a new film by a Major filmmaker (in a year full of them) that focuses on depression, grief and also manages to be very funny at the same time. And, as Alexander Payne told us in the pre-movie sequence at Alamo Drafthouse, he explicitly wanted to evoke the character-driven films of the 1970s, specifically ones by Hal Ashby like The Last Detail (1973).

That happens to be exactly in my wheelhouse. So it's not a surprise that I loved this movie. But the degree to which I enjoyed this movie and felt, I don’t know, soothed by this movie surprised me during and after watching it.

I don’t know about you, but it feels like this year is barely making it to the end. I don’t ascribe to “worst year ever” cliches (Do you know what it was like in 1200 B.C.E? How about any random year in the 17th century? We could talk about like 600 A.D. Lots of crazy stuff happening then) there is a slight feeling of exhaustion in the air. Maybe that’s true about every year and maybe I’m influenced by one or two things at my job, but things feel harder right now.

So being able to lose myself in a two and half hour movie was more than a small joy. It felt like a huge victory, a boost to my spirits. The Holdovers is what a movie should be. A chance for you to get close to a few characters for a short time, feel a wide range of emotions, forget who you are and what you are doing, and leave feeling something.

What I felt watching this movie was both a sense of longing and melancholy as well as a great sense of love. I’ll address the latter first. I felt a sense of love leaving The Holdovers because the film itself loved its characters. It regarded each of the three major characters with empathy, despite their clear imperfections. That attribute is what I have been taught to expect from the greatest works of fiction—and I make my own humble attempts to achieve that effect in my own writing.

The sense of longing and melancholy is a bit more abstract. I realize I haven’t explained what The Holdovers is about. You can read full summaries elsewhere but it follows three people (a long-tenured teacher, a smart ass student, and the head cook) at a fictional all-boy’s boarding school in New England during the holiday break of 1970. 

And god does this movie feel like a northeast winter. Every shot and every location reminded me of some moment from my life: walking across my own snowy college campus in Upstate New York, a holy night I spent by myself walking around the cold streets of Boston in December, the small town streets of Vermont towns I’ve spent time with my closest friends in, old wooden bars you can find on Long Island or Massachusetts or Rhode Island or Vermont or towns that dot the Catskills and the Adirondacks, the snowy roads and sad old wooden apartment buildings dirtied from winter with wooden staircases scaffolding their sides all at the brink of falling down but somehow persevering.

Maybe I felt all that because I’m living through my first non-Northeast winter. It’s very possible. But I felt that melancholy more because I was thankful for the life I have led. The epiphanies I experienced in those places about love or friendship or art or beauty or life itself that I thought would completely change my life but only altered my mindset for a day or two or maybe even a week before I reverted to who I was again and needed yet another small moment of epiphany to break me off my track.

I won’t spoil anything, but that’s kind of where the movie leaves its characters as well. Having learned something, having broken off their track for a moment, capable of change but perhaps still destined to remain exactly who they are.

The Holdovers, for me, feels like a movie that will become a staple to watch around Christmas for years to come. Now, granted, my idea of a good slate of holiday or holiday-feeling movies is Eyes Wide Shut, Diner, and Inside Llewyn Davis, so I might have a particular slant.

But take my word for it with The Holdovers. This is a movie filled with life and love set around Christmas that will find a nice home in your holiday rotation.