Set in the winter of 1970, The Holdovers follows three unlikely companions stranded at a quiet New England boarding school during Christmas break: a grumpy history teacher, a sharp-tongued student with nowhere to go, and a grieving cook. What begins as an awkward obligation slowly turns into an unexpected journey of connection, healing, and hope.
Directed by Alexander Payne, known for Sideways, Nebraska, and The Descendants, the film feels like a handwritten note pulled from a desk drawer and reread years later. Payne deliberately places the story in the early 1970s. The grainy look, the period soundtrack, the unhurried rhythm all reinforce that choice. It moves at its own pace, unconcerned with modern attention spans or algorithmic urgency. That patience becomes part of its charm.
Paul Giamatti gives one of his most textured performances as Paul Hunham, a classics teacher steeped in ancient history and present-day resentment. He smells bad, sounds worse and is oddly pleased by both facts. Dominic Sessa makes an impressive debut as Angus Tully, a bright but bruised teenager left behind by a family that cannot quite face him. Then there is Da’Vine Joy Randolph as Mary, the school cook and emotional center of the film. Her grief, rooted in the loss of her son during the Vietnam War, hangs quietly over every scene she enters.
The film did not explode at the box office, but it lingered. Word spread. During the holidays especially, it found its audience. Giamatti earned a Golden Globe for Best Actor. Randolph went on an awards run that felt both inevitable and deeply earned, collecting more than a dozen Best Supporting Actress wins. The music drifts through the film like falling snow. Soft. Melancholic. Occasionally jazzy. You feel it more than you hear it. David Hemingson’s screenplay balances sharp humor with real tenderness, never tipping too far in either direction. Payne has been accused before of ridiculing his characters. This time, he does something else entirely. He treats them with care. You can see it in every gruff stare, every uncomfortable pause, every slightly ruined Christmas meal. The affection is unmistakable.
There are moments in The Holdovers that stick with you long after the film ends. A hospital visit that somehow becomes an exercise in trust. A Christmas dinner that is flawed, awkward, and strangely holy. And a line that lands with quiet force when Hunham admits, almost offhandedly, that “people disappoint you.” It’s funny in a dry way. It hurts. It feels true. Which makes it, in its own crooked fashion, very much a Christmas story.
At its heart, the film can be read through a single biblical idea: Emmanuel, God with us (Matthew 1:23). Christmas, at least in Christian theology, is not a celebration of ideal families or polished faith. It is the claim that God chooses proximity over distance, presence over perfection. God enters human loneliness. God sits in the mess.
None of the main characters wear their faith on their sleeves. Hunham openly prides himself on his atheism, handing out philosophy books where prayers might be expected. Yet the Gospel slips in sideways, through presence rather than proclamation. Mary, the only explicitly religious character, never lectures or corrects anyone. She listens. She feeds people. She remains. Like Mary of Bethlehem, she carries grief and hope in the same breath, never pretending one cancels out the other.
A simple reading of Emmanuel leads to a simple truth: God does not save from afar. God enters the story. God stays. God becomes, quite literally, a holdover.
Hunham is trapped in his own sharp intellect and emotional distance, reminiscent of the Pharisees Jesus often challenged: learned, disciplined, and profoundly alone. Angus is the lost child, not abandoned by circumstance but by comfort and privilege. Mary is the suffering servant, bearing the unbearable weight of a son lost to war. Together, they form an accidental trinity of brokenness, each incomplete on their own.
One scene captures this with striking clarity: a makeshift Christmas moment where nothing looks right, yet everything feels honest. There is no choir, no Mass, no nativity set. Still, grace hangs in the air. It recalls Luke’s Gospel, where shepherds, not scholars, are the first to recognize holiness. Mary, the cook, understands something Hunham cannot yet articulate: love often arrives disguised as inconvenience.
The film challenges Hunham’s atheism without debate or spectacle. It does not argue Christianity into existence. It lives it. As St. John writes, “We love because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Hunham’s transformation is not a conversion to religious language, but to religious practice: sacrifice, honesty, and the courage to let go of pride.
The Holdovers feels like a Christmas film not because of carols or candlelight, but because it understands what Christmas often feels like in real life. Lonely. Uncomfortable. A little bitter. Still open to miracle. It suggests that family can be accidental, that grace does not always arrive on time, and that redemption can be as simple, and as costly, as choosing to stay when escape would be easier.
There is humor throughout. Hunham’s grumpiness borders on the sacramental. Angus’ teenage sarcasm could cut glass. Mary’s eye-rolls deserve their own trophy. Yet beneath the laughter runs a quiet theological current: God comes not to the celebrated, but to those left behind.
This Christmas, in a world full of departures and distractions, who are you willing to stay with, and what part of yourself might be healed if you do?
Sometimes, the miracle is not going home.
Sometimes, the miracle is becoming home for someone else.
