Set at a New England boarding school around Christmas 1970, Alexander Payne’s 2023 film, The Holdovers centers on the school’s three holiday “holdovers”, that is, those who are unable to leave campus for the winter break. Occupying the empty campus during the frigid northeastern winter is Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a cranky, unmarried classics teacher who is despised by his students, 15-year old Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a frustrated young man whose mother has left him at school while she travels with her new husband, and Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), the school’s head cook and a mother whose son died in the Vietnam War shortly before the start of the film’s events.
Once the semester ends and the three idiosyncratic characters of Paul, Angus, and Mary find themselves alone, the warm and humorous callbacks to the seventies give way to a meditation on the importance of family, community, and interpersonal connection superficially shaped by our three “holdovers” frustration with being stuck at campus, but ultimately defined by their longing for familial love and community.
Paul resigns himself to being a bookish bachelor. Mary yearns to connect with her sister and her brother-in-law after her son’s death. Angus aches for a time when his family was unified, a time before his father’s debilitating mental illness and his mother’s escape with a new husband.
While the characters mitigate these pains via their unexpected connection and friendship, they are nevertheless still haunted by the specters of loneliness, death, and family dissolution. Their continued, quiet longing for real family connections does not negate the power of their “found family” but rather illuminates some important truths.
First, no matter the state of our family, found family, friends, and social networks are integral to human flourishing. Intact and broken families and their members truly thrive with the support of their community. The friendship that Angus, Paul, and Mary experienced does not replace family, but rather helps orient them toward being better versions of themselves for their family as it exists and their family in their future.
Second, the desires of the characters remind us where we best thrive. Paul’s uncomfortable resignation to singleness reminds us that marriage makes men happier. Angus’ longing for an intact family reminds us that children thrive with intact families. Mary’s desire to connect with her sister and her brother-in-law reminds us that immediate-family relationships matter well into adulthood.
Finally, while the isolation and yearning for family and connection in The Holdovers is ultimately driven by the personal suffering of its characters, the broad strokes of the characters’ experiences of family are also shaped by the world of the early 1970s and its rapid social atomization and family fragmentation. 55 years later, these destabilizing trends have accelerated. For the sake of the flourishing of each Texan and the whole of each Texan, we ought to take a cue from The Holdovers. Family, marriage, children, and found families matter for the happiness of each and every one of us.
