In The Holdovers, Alexander Payne and screenwriter David Hemingson pay quiet homage to the revolutionary spirit of Christmas. They show its impact – acknowledged or unrecognized - through three people haunted by grief and despair. The externalities of Christmas rather a newborn in a manger at the fringes of the Roman Empire, trigger a healing process from brokenness to hope.
The film sketches out two different responses to these existential crises, one Christian, the other, rooted in classical culture. They share two transformative traits: love and communion, free to grow when they break out of their wounded selves. The two responses converge at the end, when the choices made by the three protagonists point to cautious hope.
The first road sign of the journey is in plain sight, written in Greek and Latin on the blackboard in the classroom where the classics professor Paul Hunham, played by Paul Giamatti, conducts a contentious relationship with his students. “Nosce te ipsum”, the Latin translation of the Greek original,“Know thyself”.
The relationship between the teacher and Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), the angry student left behind by his parents at the prep school for the Christmas vacation, evolves from adversarial to a negotiated truce, until a series of dramatic events pushes it to that of a master and disciple. It is a form of love, as Andrei Tarkovsky has beautifully described the friendship between teacher and student.
The parallel trajectories of teacher and student are variations of the same process: first, a painful peeling off of obfuscation and hardened perceptions, then a struggle for sincerity, from where love - emotional and spiritual - can begin to operate. It is also a battle against pride and anger; if unrestrained, the process is derailed.
Like Payne in The Holdovers, Paul Schrader explores brokenness in First Reformed (2017) and The Card Counter (2021). Both filmmakers come close to the mystery of the human person – a soul incarnated in a body – but stop short of plunging in. They touch the edges of a redemption that is only hinted at the end of each film. Schrader follows the steps of austere Robert Bresson, as he has noted, while Payne finds a place in the sunny world of Marcel Pagnol. All three films can of course be seen through the “transcendental” lens, observed by Schrader himself in Carl Dreyer, Paul Bresson and Yasujiro Ozu: works that reveal through the physicality of film a spiritual dimension – the sacramental impulse of Christian art. The stories show the workings of hope and mercy in the economy of salvation, after an anguished stay in the dark night of the soul.
The third protagonist in The Holdovers is the cook, played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph. She offers a subtle but straightforward rendition of Christian love. Mary Lamb – a name that could not be more explicit - represents the practical way of loving, more intuitive than rational. From a place of darkness and despair for the recent loss of her only son in Vietnam, her gruff exterior hides a soul in the Christian African American spiritual tradition ready to continue her life’s journey. The baby her sister is expecting will repurpose her life as will the love of a good man.
The Holdovers can be seen as a work of Catholic imagination, showing how hard hearts, intellectual animosity and emotional blockage can be transformed by grace and beauty.
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