Review by Andrew Swafford
Like many an English teacher, I have a complicated relationship with Dead Poets Society. Robin Williams’ speech proclaiming business as the thing that keeps us alive but poetry the thing we stay alive for felt deeply inspirational to a much younger me. Having gone back to it in years since, so much of it rings false now, from its absurd pedagogy to its vaguely creepy glorification of not taking no for an answer in the carpe-ing of one’s deim. The speeches still stir the soul of course, but they mostly suggest to me now that the way to be a great teacher is to be Robin Williams – no one has been Robin Williams before or since, so understandably the job is hard. Now that I’m turning the corner on my first decade in education, I’m so grateful to see a film like The Holdovers, which feels deeply true in its depiction of the nature of the profession, both in its bitterness and its poetry.
Set in the winter of 1970, The Holdovers is a boarding school drama dressed up to feel plucked from a bygone era. From an old-school blue screen R-rating at the start of the film to a folksy credits-montage set to a wintry New England landscape, The Holdovers evokes a warm feeling of soft coziness that is immediately punctured by the sheer presence that is Paul Giamatti. Sort of a dark mirror of Robin Williams in Dead Poets, Giamatti’s Mr. Hunnam is blessed with a superhuman ability to insult his students. It is mainly in this way that the film isn’t quite going for realism: there is an elevated grandiloquence to the wickedly cruel insults peppered throughout its script. If you, like me, get a cathartic thrill out of hearing students called “snarling visigoths” among other such vagaries, rest assured that The Holdovers contains multitudes. And it must be noted that there is perhaps no better actor for this role than Paul Giamatti, who just downright relishes the barbarous wit of Mr. Hunnam. To me, the character feels like a personified amalgamation of every teacher’s meanest thoughts.
Mr Hunnam’s bitterness is excessive to the point of cruelty and comedy, but it’s not unfounded: as a teacher at a prestigious prep school, he has been pressured to reward mediocre effort from students who Da’Vine Joy Randolph at one point describes as “dumb and rich – a popular combination around here.” Teaching is an inherently emotional profession, and anger towards one’s students or the educational system at large is one of those emotions. The fact that we’re able to see Mr. Hunnam at his worst self is itself a cathartic thing to see as a teacher, considering teachers arise in the public imagination as stoic heroes who never complain because they do it for the kids!
For good and for ill, they do in fact do it for the kids. Much of this film’s plot involves Mr. Hunnam babysitting an angsty teen over Christmas, and observing the unique relationship that forms between teacher and student is ultimately what The Holdovers is most interested in. It’s an unexplainably gratifying experience when you do feel like you’ve formed a bond with and made a lasting impression upon a young person searching for mentors – and the film also emphasizes the fact that impression often imprints both ways. Paul Hunnam is a hilarious embodiment of the idea that teachers bring all of their personal flaws and histories with them into the classroom, and his story is a testament to the idea that teachers often grow just as much as students do when trying to get through to young people.