The Holdovers: Dysfunction is Salvation

Quiet misery in isolation drains life faster than the loud ramblings of agony. And somehow, human dysfunction can help pull us out of that lonely hell.

Whether you think that’s a good or bad thing, this truth of human nature unfolds in Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers. We’re transported to a 1970s New England school where a grouchy teacher, Paul Hunham (a career-best performance from Paul Giamatti), is forced to look after several students holding over the winter holiday season on the school grounds. Alongside the school’s head cook, Hunham ends up taking care of a particularly smart but unruly student.

It may be a simple setup, even boring almost. Yet the film’s simplicity allows the more vital narrative nuances to take precedence. Each of our three central characters (Hunham, the unruly student and the cook) come from wildly different backgrounds and experience deepening conflicts that come to bear on their personal insecurities.

It is as human as humanity gets, where our imperfections tend to fill the gaps of others’ imperfections.

Their icy holdover at campus eventually melts and amalgamates into a sort of dysfunctional family. Hunham and the student develop an unspoken father-son fondness for one another that fills each other’s innate desire for some kind of familial bond, while the cook embodies a steely motherly figure between the two of them as she processes the tragic loss of her own son.

In this regard, The Holdovers serves as a meditative device on how lonely, melancholic souls find solace among peers undergoing similar tribulations – and more than that – how they can together fuel an endearing revolt against the trappings of their own depressive chains padlocked by their own rejections, failures and losses. It is as human as humanity gets, where our imperfections tend to fill the gaps of others’ imperfections.

This is why the eternal dysfunction of the human experience has been history’s greatest gift and curse to us, unwittingly passed down from generation to generation under the false, unknowing bliss of thinking we are living a distinctive life from others – only to find out that we were just echoing the familiar vulnerability of everyone else’s experiences on Earth.

The Holdovers, like a warm blanket on a cold winter, embraces the chaos of dishonest ways, lost dreams and flawed pasts as it unearths the bittersweet beauty of how any tragedy can bind us together and how the answers to our grief rests in another’s own fragility.

And maybe that’s all life is, all of us unintentionally holding over our flaws and dysfunction for the next person who might need our imperfection to help themselves, and vice versa.

Funny how it’s our curses that can truly bless others.