The Holdovers

Alexander Payne's The Holdovers is a warmhearted old-school character study about three lonely people stuck together at a New England boarding school over Christmas break in 1970. It is funny, sad, beautifully performed, and unmistakably rooted in the craft traditions of 1970s American cinema: grainy film stock, period soundtrack, naturalistic performances, unhurried pacing. It is also one of the most traditionally oriented major releases of the 2023 Oscar season. And it is telling that this fact was almost never mentioned by the critics who loved it.

The premise is simple. Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a classics teacher at Barton Academy, is a man disliked by nearly everyone: his body odor, his exacting standards, his refusal to pass legacy students on principle, and his general air of scholarly contempt have made him the school's least popular faculty member. As punishment for failing a senator's son and causing institutional embarrassment, he is assigned to supervise the handful of students who cannot go home for Christmas break. Most of them are quickly retrieved by a parent. One is not: Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a scholarship student whose mother has taken off to Vermont with her new husband and simply... did not arrange for her son to have anywhere to go.

The third member of the trio is Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph), the school's cafeteria manager, still raw with grief after losing her only son Curtis to Vietnam. She stays because where else would she go.

These three inhabit an emptied school over the holiday. What follows is funny, melancholy, and quietly devastating.

What the Film Values

The Holdovers is not a film without politics. The year 1970 is not an accident: Vietnam hangs over the story like weather. Mary's son died in a war that was still grinding young men down. Angus has a wealthy stepfather pulling strings to keep him out of the draft. Hunham himself is a casualty of the meritocratic ideal: a brilliant scholar who should have been a Harvard professor and ended up at a boarding school because of a plagiarism accusation that may or may not have been just.

But the film's politics are of an old-fashioned humanist variety. It does not lecture. It does not assign blame along ideological fault lines. It simply shows three people whose circumstances have left them stranded and watches them slowly extend trust across the class and temperament divides that should keep them apart.

What the film genuinely values:

The transmission of knowledge. Hunham is the film's moral center, and Hunham's great love is classical history. His reverence for the ancient world, for what the Greeks and Romans understood about human nature, is played as genuine and not as ironic. The film treats the humanities with the same seriousness that the humanities deserve. When Hunham tells Tully that studying history means understanding how little human nature has changed in 3,000 years, it is one of the most classically traditional statements any Hollywood film has made in years.

The redemptive value of honest mentorship. The core relationship between Hunham and Tully is a classic mentor-student bond: an older man who has failed to transmit his wisdom to his own generation finding an unlikely conduit in a damaged teenager. This is a story structure as old as storytelling. The film honors it.

Grief as a legitimate and private experience. Mary's grief for her son is never politicized. The film treats her loss as a personal, interior wound, not as a social justice occasion. She does not deliver speeches about systemic racism or the political machinery of the draft. She simply misses her son. The film respects that simplicity.

Personal integrity over institutional compliance. Hunham failed a senator's son on merit. He did it again when the pressure came to reverse the grade. This cost him. The film clearly regards his refusal to compromise as admirable, not self-defeating. In a cultural moment when institutional compliance has become a survival skill, a film that presents stubborn personal integrity as heroic is making a statement.

Where It Gets Complicated

The film is not without its liberal assumptions. The Vietnam framing invites an implicitly antiwar reading. A subplot involving Tully's possible heritage gestures toward issues of legitimacy and class privilege in ways that a stricter traditional analysis would flag. Hunham's cynical view of institutional religion (he delivers a few withering asides about Christmas chapel) reflects Payne's secular humanist worldview.

But none of these elements rise to the level of ideology. They are the ambient cultural atmosphere of a 1970 setting, and Hemingson's script handles them with restraint. No character delivers a speech about systemic anything. No institutional villain is set up to be taken down. The film's conflicts are personal, not political.

The Holdovers is what Hollywood used to make routinely and now makes almost never: a humanist comedy-drama about people learning to care for each other across the walls they've built to keep the world at arm's length. It earned five Oscar nominations for a reason. It is one of the best American films of the decade so far.

Score Margin: +8 TRAD

Parental Guidance

Appropriate for mature teenagers and adults.

• Language: Some profanity, in keeping with the 1970 setting. Nothing extreme.
• Themes: Grief, loneliness, class and privilege, Vietnam-era draft anxiety, academic failure, family dysfunction.
• Sexual content: None explicit. Brief references to adult romantic relationships.
• Violence: None.
• Drinking/smoking: Period-accurate social drinking and smoking depicted, not glamorized.
• Historical/ideological: The film's Vietnam backdrop is handled as social atmosphere, not political argument. An antiwar reading is available but the film does not push it.

Age recommendation: 14+ with parental viewing for the younger end. A genuinely good film that teenagers can learn from.

Review by the VirtueVigil Editorial Team | March 15, 2026 | VVWS v1.1

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Vietnam antiwar framing as ambient atmosphere	3	High	Moderate	2.1
Secular humanist cynicism about institutional religion	3	Moderate	Low	1.5
Class privilege critique through draft inequity	3	Moderate	Low	1.5
Institutional authority (school administration) portrayed as political and unprincipled	2	Moderate	Low	0.4
TOTAL WOKE				5.5

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Classical learning presented as genuinely valuable and worth defending	5	High	High	6.3
Personal integrity over institutional compliance	4	High	High	5.04
Redemptive cross-generational mentorship	4	High	Moderate	2.8
Grief as personal and interior, not politicized	3	High	Low	1.05
The Christmas setting treated with warmth and cultural respect	3	High	Low	1.05
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				16.2

Score Margin: +8 TRAD