Movie recommendation: The Holdovers (and a shout out to liberal studies)

Last night, in an attempt to avoid the annoyance/heartbreak that watching Boston sports can bring, I flipped through the streaming options on Amazon Prime and settled on The Holdovers (2023). What a good decision that was! It made me laugh at times, but mostly, it made me think long and hard about my teaching practice, why I am a teacher, and what we sometimes forget when we've been behind the desk for so long --in my case, 36 years. In a lot of ways, the movie hit me in the same way that watching Dead Poets Society did when I first saw it, and I think it's important to note that both films focus on what we, as educators, stand to lose when we advocate for, deeply care about, our students. And, to be quite honest, what we stand to lose if we don't.

The plot involves a veteran teacher (Paul Giamatti) who is burnt out; his students don't care about ancient civilization, they hate him, he despises them, and the whole teacher-students relationship is broken almost beyond repair. It is a Massachusetts boarding school setting, and, through some back-door dealing on the part of a colleague, Mr. Hunham ends up being the teacher who must oversee the few students who can't go home over the holidays. The dorms are not heated over break, the food is whatever is left in the walk-in, and the weather is typical December; cold and snowy. They must make the best of it and all bunk in the infirmary, and there is nothing at all vacation-like about to happen, just studies and rules. One of the students has an important father who comes via private helicopter and who takes all but one of the students with his son on vacation to go skiing. The one young man left behind, Angus (Dominic Sessa), can't go because his mother and new step-dad have gone on their "honeymoon" and, last minute, choose not to take him along. They are also impossible to contact for the necessary permission, so Angus is stuck at school with just the refectory manager, Mary, and his much-disliked history teacher. Everyone else is gone. 

The movie progresses, and the layers are peeled back. We learn about the loss of Mary's son in Vietnam, we learn about Angus' losses (not going to give you any spoilers), and we ultimately learn about Mr. Hunham's own personal losses, too. They are all holdovers from their past; they are the true holdovers, not the boys left behind over break. 

Ultimately, Mr Hunham is called to account by the headmaster, who happens to be a former student of his; Angus' mother and stepfather show up after the holidays, and they are angry, and they want to remove Angus from the school and send him to a military school. Angus is a very smart but broken young man, and Mr Hunham takes the blame for the critical event (again, no spoilers), which ensures that Angus can stay at school, but Mr Hunham is fired on the spot. 

He sacrifices himself for a student who, just two weeks before, he could not stand, or so it seems. Indeed, I think he sacrifices the job in order to save himself. 

Now, I'm not doing this film a whole lot of justice, because I really want you to watch it. Da'Vine Joy Randolph was awarded an Oscar for her performance, and the film itself was nominated for five awards, including Best Picture. It is a deeply moving, introspective film, one that dives deeply into what we hold secret unto ourselves, how it affects our relationships with others and with ourselves, and the damage that can come from holding those secrets. 

Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, this film is so much more than a teacher-in-a-boarding-school-gets-to-know-the-students movie. While on the "field trip" to Boston, Mr Hunham shows Angus around the museum, and he says,

• There's nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man's every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present.

This is how I feel about literature; it's hard to get kids to see that we live in a fluid continuum, and that what we do, think, breathe, and feel is connected to everything else, and that it's the historians and writers, mostly, and the artists and musicians, who have preserved this connection. To dismiss the liberal studies in favor of more mechanistic pursuits is to dismiss what makes us human. 

Give the movie a chance; you won't regret it. Yes, it's rated R for the usual stuff, mostly language and smoking and alcohol, but all of those elements are used deftly; they are not gratuitously embedded. I hope you like it as much as I do. I know that it will live in my head for a while.

Take care,

C