Christmas films often have this standard of being cozy, comforting, uplifting and being laced with abundant holiday cheer. Set in the 1970s during the winter holidays, the 2023 film ‘The Holdovers’ veers away from this typicality of Christmas movies by being a palpable portrayal of the melancholy and loneliness that is present during the festive season and the experience of finding yourself celebrating it with a family that is not bound to you by blood, but family nonetheless.
Equal parts humorous, heartwarming and deeply sad—The Holdovers sets about with a private boarding school in New England closing down for the Christmas holidays. Five students are staying behind due to a multitude of personal reasons, familial or otherwise, with their abhorred ancient history teacher who is being punished by the headmaster for refusing to give his student with a wealthy, influential father a passing grade. After a few days of spending the holidays in the most school-like manner under the supervision of professor Paul Hunham, the father of one of the kids arrive in a helicopter and agrees to take all the students to a ski trip.
As they depart, only Angus Tully is left holding over as his family fails to answer the professor’s calls. In the heart of this film are its three pivotal characters—a troublemaking teenage boy, an ill-tempered boarding school history teacher and the head cook, cafeteria manager and grieving mother named Mary Lamb, who had recently lost her son in the Vietnam War. Mary Lamb is played by the brilliant and irreplaceable Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who won an Oscar for her role in The Holdovers.
“I don’t think I have ever had a real family Christmas like this before.”
These characters make an unexpected, non-traditional and seemly unloved triad. As the three are given no choice but to begrudgingly spend the holidays together at an isolated and closed boarding school, they find themselves gradually breaking down their barriers and developing an earnest connection and understanding with the other in the span of those two weeks. The different kinds of disconnectedness from their “real” families makes way for Paul, Mary and Angus in end up in a kind of their own atypical found family.
While it has been only a year since its release, The Holdovers has already managed to find itself a dedicated audience with its heart and with how it captures the 70s nostalgia without over-reliance on it. It was quite necessary to make room for the experience of not only being estranged from your family during a time that is marked by togetherness but also finding that connection elsewhere.
