Angus Tully never liked Barton Academy, what with its decades of tradition and oak-paneled classrooms and its way-too-pampered students. True, he’s never been a big fan of school itself, judging from the number of those he’s been kicked out of. But Barton? It’s positively painful.
How painful? How horrifically awful is Barton? Why, Tully need only point to his ancient history class and its ancient teacher, Paul Hunham.
To his face, the students call Mr. Hunham “Sir,” as Barton code insists. Behind his back, they call him “Walleye.” But Hunham’s lazy eye could be forgiven if he didn’t smell so bad. His body odor might be overlooked if he wasn’t such a hard teacher. And perhaps even his exacting standards might be tolerable if he didn’t take such obvious glee in it.
“I can’t fail this class!” one well-heeled student whines.
“Oh, don’t sell yourself short, Mr. Kountz,” Walleye says from his classroom pulpit. “I truly believe that you can.”
But Christmas break beckons. Soon, for two glorious weeks, Angus Tully will be free of Barton. Free of Walleye. Free of—
Wait, what’s that? Tully’s mother wants to go on an overdue honeymoon with Tully’s new stepfather? Alone? She wants Angus to stay at Barton through the holidays?
Tully is devastated. It’ll be just him and a handful of other losers with nowhere else to go during the holidays.
And the biggest loser of all? Their babysitter. Their prison guard. Their tormentor-in-chief … Mr. “Walleye” Hunham.
Happy holidays? Right.
We know how Angus Tully feels about Mr. Hunham. But Tully’s not exactly a charmer, either. If Barton Academy (circa 1970) was the site of a Survivor-style reality TV show, both characters would be among the first voted off this particular island.
But they’re both stuck on that island, along with the brusque, quiet cook, Mary Shepherd. It would seem to be the breeding ground for disaster—but it’s not. Their close proximity leads to closer connections.
In fact, their shared meals form the bedrock for shared stories. And—call it a Christmas miracle—the people stuck at Barton start to like each other. Mr. Hunham discovers that Tully’s more than just a sullen jerk: He’s a smart, thoughtful and hurting young man who desperately needs some encouragement. Likewise, Tully discovers that Mr. Hunham is more than just the ogre he sees in class: He’s a real, living human who deals with adversity and has overcome a number of challenges.
Mary Shepherd, the third member of their little troupe, is coping with her own anguish: She lost her son in Vietnam, and she’s just now beginning to grieve. But she serves as an anchor for them all. And she reminds her sometimes self-centered holiday-mates that they should look out for one another, too.
One of the holdovers, homesick for his parents and having nightmares, wets his bed. Tully comforts him and tells him that they’ll get it cleaned up in the morning.
The Holdovers doesn’t suggest that any of these grumpy characters experiences a Scrooge-like transformation. These are still deeply flawed, and often annoying, individuals. But their two weeks together gives each of them time to dig through their brittle shells to better understand the people underneath. These characters learn to extend a little kindness and grace, too. And before the film is done, someone makes an unexpected sacrifice.
Barton is a Christian institution, and we’re taken into a mandatory, end-of-semester chapel service early on. The pastor asks the boys and parents in attendance to “pray for those less fortunate than we,” and he asks for special healing for Mary as she grieves for her lost son. He references an all-powerful God and, in closing, wishes the congregants a merry Christmas. “Or happy Hannukah, whatever the case may be.”
It’s a reminder that while Barton might be a Christian institution, not all who attend—or teach—classes there are Christians themselves.
One of the other titular holdovers is a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints, and his parents are on a mission trip. Tully mentors another homesick student, and Tully coaches him on keeping an embarrassing secret a secret. If he doesn’t, Tully warns, other students will “crucify you. Which would be ironic, because you’re Buddhist.”
Mr. Hunham is apparently an atheist. For Christmas, he hands out copies of pagan Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, telling recipients that the book is like “the Bible, the Q’uran and the [Hindu] Bhagavad Gita” all in one. “The best part is not one mention of God!” he adds. But he also admits that there have been times when he’s “prayed to a God I don’t even believe in.”
Mary Shepherd, meanwhile, seems to be a Christian; she wears a cross around her neck and sleeps in a room where a cross hangs on a wall.
And obviously, the whole film revolves around Christmas. The Barton choir sings religious Christmas carols, and we see plenty of Christmas elements throughout the film. A snow globe depicts Santa Claus looking down at the baby Jesus.
Mr. Hunham and Tully go to a museum, where both ponder a bit of ancient Greek pornography, depicting a man and a woman intimately engaged. Mr. Hunham uses that image as a teaching illustration. He says that while while every generation thinks it has invented everything (from angst to debauchery), there’s nothing new under the sun.
Tully asks Mr. Hunham whether he’s ever had sex (believing the answer is no). Mr. Hunham doesn’t answer directly, but he does talk about how in his younger days, he did things that would “curl your toes.” (He also tells Mary that he forsakes “sensual pleasures” for more spiritual ones. Mary is skeptical.)
Mr. Hunham looks at a pornographic magazine behind a thick history book. (Nothing explicit is visible to us.) We hear references to pornographic pictures in a dormitory. Tully meets a girl about his age at a party. When she asks if he’s trying to look down her shirt, he says “No … yes.” The two kiss shortly thereafter but it goes no further.
Another man and woman kiss. There’s a reference to bodily fluids. The game show The Newlywed Game becomes a favorite evening pastime for the holdovers, and Mary speculates which couples are headed for divorce. We learn that Mary had planned to marry the father of her son, but the father died before they could tie the knot.
Jokes are made about the skimpy swim trunks Tully packs for Christmas vacation, with one student calling them “panties.”
Tully dislocates a shoulder after taking an ill-advised leap. He and another student fight in the dorm. And he nearly gets into a fight with a couple of people in a bar.
Mr. Hunham refers to several ancient wars. We see memorials to former Barton students who went on to die in war. Tully was expelled from a school for setting off a firecracker in the bathroom, and another character mentions how he hit someone with a car.
About 35 f-words and more than 20 s-words. We also hear “b–ch,” “b–tard,” “h—,” “g-dd–n,” “d–n,” “p-ss,” “p—y,” “a–” and “crap.” Jesus’ name is abused six times. We hear some crass insults referencing male anatomy.
Mr. Hunham drinks a lot. His beverage of choice is Jim Beam, and one student tells another that he can smell the alcohol on Mr. Hunham in class. When Christmas break first begins, Mr. Hunham watches TV with Mary, and she pours some liquor into his coffee cup. He orders drinks at a bar and imbibes at a party. While he never gets wobblingly drunk, the film definitely suggests he has a problem.
Mary’s issues with alcohol aren’t as pronounced, but she does get drunk at a party—both instigated and facilitated by her grief. The liquor helps her grieve, too, the movie suggests; it’s the first time we see her cry over her son.
Tully is too young to drink legally, but he does sneak out of his room to imbibe communion wine. Later, he does his best to convince Mr. Hunham to buy him a Miller beer. (A running joke throughout the film characterizes the beverage as “the champagne of beer.”) Mary and Mr. Hunham try to order Tully a Cherries Jubilee—a concoction of ice cream, cherries and brandy that has been set alight—but the waitress sternly says no. They argue that all the alcohol would burn off, but the waitress is adamant, so the three create their own form of Cherries Jubilee in a nearby parking lot.
Tully and Mr. Hunham both take antidepressants. There are references to marijuana use. Students and faculty smoke cigarettes.
[Spoiler Warning] Mr. Hunham keeps an unopened bottle of expensive whiskey in his office. At the end of the film, he opens the bottle, takes a swig and purposely spits it out—suggesting (among other things) that his days of being dependent on alcohol may be behind him.
Mr. Hunham insists, “Barton men don’t lie.” But both he and Tully lie repeatedly—sometimes to save face, sometimes as a joke and at least once to protect someone else.
We hear about Mr. Hunham’s body odor several times. When Tully confronts the teacher over the fact that he smells like fish, Mr. Hunham explains that he’s aware. His body doesn’t break down a certain chemical, and as a result he’s dealt with body-odor issues for his entire life. (One night, as the three prepare to go to a party, the self-conscious teacher sprays air freshener onto his armpits.)
Someone spreads a rumor that Mr. Hunham eats feces. Mr. Hunham makes references to some sundry bathroom habits of ancient civilizations.
We hear that Mr. Hunham was pressured to pass a student because his parents were huge school donors. Tully is a brat to Mr. Hunham at first, and he breaks several school rules during the first days of Christmas break.
Sometimes being a Plugged In reviewer can feel a little like living in Mr. Hunham’s shoes—hopefully without the unfortunate fishy smell.
We watch the year’s movies trundle by our slightly askew eyeballs. We grade them by what we see and hear. We shake our head over each unnecessary bit of skin exposure, sigh with every uttered f-word. Like Mr. Hunham, we can be exasperated by each new cinematic crop. We insist that movies should hold themselves to a higher standard. We see what they could be and are disappointed by what they’re satisfied with being.
Perhaps like Walleye, we mutter, under our breath, “Philistines. Vulgar little Philistines.”
I don’t always like being that guy, honestly. I think anyone who has taken to the keyboard for Plugged In has felt, occasionally, like a schoolmarm with a ruler, ready to slap a film’s hand for drawing outside the lines. But someone’s gotta do it, right?
But even when we insist that a movie (and its creators) could do better, we aren’t blind to what it does well.
Alexander Payne, the director of The Holdovers, has earned his share of Hollywood hardware. A two-time Oscar winner (for his screenplays of Sideways and The Descendants, respectively), knows all about human imperfection. His directorial career has been based on taking broken, brittle and often bratty characters, tossing them up on screen and turning them into multidimensional people—people who may still exasperate us, but characters whom we care about nonetheless. Payne has a knack for staring at humankind with a withering, unforgiving glare, yet finding the ability to tell his stories with a wry tenderness and grace.
The Holdovers gives us that glare, and that grace. It reminds us that hurting people cover their wounds with different sorts of scar tissue, and it takes work to get through. None of us make it easy.
If The Holdovers walked into our Plugged In class, we’d have no choice but to hold it against the standards inculcated by Paul in Philippians 4:8. We look for the true, the noble, the right, the pure, the lovely. This R-rated film—with its f-words and pornographic asides, its characters that lie and grouse and insult—falls short of those standards, certainly. And we at Plugged In rarely grade on a curve.
But the movie itself does feel human. It feels true, if you will, to who we are—even as it, and we, falls short of what we could and should be. In the midst of the movie’s imperfections, you see characters crawling toward something better. And perhaps there’s something noble in that after all.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
