The Holdovers (2023): A Slice-of-Life Story that Entertains and Tears Up in Equal Measure  

Do you ever watch a film which you weren’t expecting to be that great, only for it to, well, turn out to be really, really great? Do you ever then, after crying quite a lot in the cinema, feel a moral need to immediately put pen-to-paper and write a review screeching from the high heavens for everyone to drop what they’re doing to immediately watch a film? 

Ahem. As I write this, dearest reader, I find myself in the exact (albeit quite specific) scenario described to you above. Here I am, fresh after watching Alexander Payne’s newest slice-of-life Christmas comedy, The Holdovers, cheeks still tear-stained, imploring you in the strongest possible terms to give this one a go.  

A film lovingly pasted on screen and tied up with a bow 

The Holdovers is a film ripped directly out of my heart, lovingly pasted back up on screen and tied up with a bow of Paul Giamatti’s Roman Empire references to boot.  

We follow the main characters   – Paul Hunham (Giamatti), a stiff-upper-lip classics teacher at a New England prep school, and Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), an emotionally-fraught teen desperately trying not to get kicked out and sent to military academy – as they are forced to reconcile with each other during the holidays after everyone else packs off and leaves for Christmas. Joining them is Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s cook (recently recovering from a devastating loss of her own), and lo, the trio become one of cinema’s most unlikely, yet heartfelt, found families. 

Every character reflected my own personal scuffles  

Though I dare not say more about the film’s plot, the trailers set me up for a cute (if not surface-level) Scrooge-esque coming-of-age story– perhaps coupled with a wistful 70s film-grain filters mixed in for good measure.  

Instead, The Holdovers (2023) was an emotional sucker punch to last me the year.  

I just felt like every character reflected my own personal scuffles throughout life – a tableau of struggles with academia (even down to not being able to remember the exact details of the Peloponnesian war), teenage angst, as well as with the black cloud of depression and melancholy. This last aspect is something that I felt the film so eloquently put into words – thinking back now, on what I watched mere hours before writing this, makes tears well up in my eyes. There is a beautiful sense of gentleness with which it comes into view, and is treated with the upmost respect and restraint; truly it is the blueprint of how mental health and internal anguish ought to be portrayed on screen. 

Payne has an astounding ability to portray each character’s interconnected struggles 

Director Alexander Payne has already proved himself to be one of the most sympathetic and human directors working in cinema today with 2013’s Nebraska–a similar road trip-style comedy that makes such acutely beautiful observations on life and human emotion that it similarly leaves you speechless. But here, Payne’s ability to so wonderfully – yet individually – portray the interconnected paths of every character’s internal struggle truly amazes me. 

It is simply astounding that a writer and director could so symbiotically understand the vision of the other – without even being the same person! I personally was floored when I learnt that David Hemingson’s incredible screenplay for The Holdovers is his debut for a feature film. 

Indeed, the comedy, despite all of the more serious topics being juggled with, still stands strong in the script. Every member of the principal cast, like the writer and director duo responsible for this masterpiece, innately understand what levels of emotion and humour to bring to each scene, and work together in dance-like unison to provoke tears and giggles in equal measure.  The tagline of the film, Discomfort and Joy, does this skilful balancing act such a great disservice – it implies a The Office-esque sense of schadenfreude to the comedy. In actuality, the comedy comes naturally from our characters not being characters, but human beings, simply living in a world much like ours where humour always dances – however uncomfortably – with sadness.  

How have we not got this man firing out scripts to the most emotionally crushing movies ever wrought by man before this point? He has a gift, for Christ’s sake!  

It’s like being beaten to death by a Simon & Garfunkel compilation album 

To conclude, I saw a review just now on the social review-aggregate site Letterboxd joking that this film is like “being beaten to death by a Cat Stevens album”. I’d suggest an alternative – it’s like being beaten to death by a Simon & Garfunkel compilation album. Going into it, you think it’s going to be a cheesy, slightly-nostalgia-bait folk indie romp; thus, when the slow-yet-sudden pang of emotional gut-wrenching causes your eyes to well up with tears, all you can do is smile and marvel at how wonderfully skilfully the whole thing was put together by a very talented group of people. 

The Holdovers will ruin you, don’t get me wrong – it will make you laugh, cry, and all other cliché good-film-going-verbs in equal measure. But it is the single most deserving film of both your time and money currently in cinemas (and probably will be for the rest of the year).