The Holdovers | A Still Small Voice
Life lessons, Giamatti-style, plus a documentary on the calling of hospital chaplains.
The first time we see Paul Hunham, the boarding-school teacher at the center of Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers, he’s grunting irritably over a stack of subpar student essays. He makes the same sound when a meeting calls him away from the stack of essays. He is loquaciously scathing with his students in the classroom. Hunham plows through his days at the upper-crust Barton Academy like a bizarro John Keating, imparting his knowledge of ancient world history with the caustic resignation of someone who has long given up trying to get other people to be as interested in it as he is. On Christmas morning he hands a book-shaped present to a student, and it’s obvious before the wrapping paper even comes off that it’s a copy of Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. “The best part about it? No God!” he explains to the nonplussed teenager.
Hunham is the sort of curmudgeon that Paul Giamatti could play in his sleep, but one of the nice things about The Holdovers is that Giamatti and Payne are wide awake, alert to the story’s possibilities. If its broad outlines—a grumpy teacher and his belligerent student are thrown together at Christmastime, and their mutual antipathy softens into respect as they learn to see beyond each other’s defenses—sound passé, they are enlivened by their particulars. David Hemingson’s sharp dialogue, wielded deftly by Payne’s cast, feels not like a grab-bag of screenwriter witticisms but a natural extension of individual personalities. Eigil Bryld’s cinematography, created using a combination of 1970s camera lenses and modern digital production, captures the chilly light and texture of a New England winter: cold linoleum, icy streams, and snowpack. The Holdovers intentionally hearkens back to an earlier era when a film could achieve success simply with a sturdy, character-based story executed well by talented craftspeople on both sides of the camera.
Payne’s embrace of this aesthetic does more than pander to the nostalgia of the cinephiles in his audience. It’s also a subtle way to align our sympathies with a protagonist who is frequently unsympathetic. Paul Hunham, too, is fond of bygone ages. He likes how the past lends itself more readily to cool-headed explication than does the present Vietnam era, with its murky war and confounding social complexities. He also likes how history gives him permission to indulge his fatalism and misanthropy—when you can see the ruins of the past, why have any hope for the future? His time with the teenage Angus (newcomer Dominic Sessa) challenges Hunham because Angus, as an in-the-flesh member of an upcoming generation, obliges him to view people and the future not as intellectual abstractions but as matters that have a claim on his sentiments and day-to-day actions.
The tension between Hunham and Angus yields an abundance of potential energy. Third-act revelations about their jealously guarded personal lives are inevitable in a movie like this, but what’s truly important is how those personal lives inform the story before they are revealed. Payne uses this tension to prod at a range of themes: class consciousness, the nature of integrity, and the special variety of self-loathing that plagues people with high standards. Their story intersects with that of Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), a cook at the school and a mother recently bereft of her son thanks to the Vietnam War. Her priorities and problems are different from theirs, but all three characters share one fundamental desire. Everyone wants to belong somewhere, to be part of some sort of community in which all members have an equal claim one one another’s honor and care.
If The Holdovers has a flaw, it’s that Giamatti and Sessa’s dynamic is so engaging that there’s not enough oxygen for Randolph’s subplot. Payne does not provide enough space for her grief to comfortably coexist with Hunham and Angus’s bickering, so she is unceremoniously deposited in an offscreen location when it comes time for those third-act revelations. Payne may intend some pointed commentary about how easily well-heeled white people are able to shrug aside the concerns of a black woman and focus on themselves, but it comes across as a quick-fix solution to an intractable script problem.
At least Payne doesn’t cheat when it comes to resolving Hunham’s and Angus’s arcs. The ending for Angus is not a triumph so much as a stay of execution, as it were. Hunham’s small heart doesn’t grow three sizes after his Christmas miracle. You even get the sense that not much will change for Hunham on a personal level. He’s growing older, with less road in front of him than behind him. His future isn’t set in stone, but its faint outlines are discernible. But Payne does permit Angus and Hunham some form of passing the torch. The last shot of Angus shows him hurrying away with the unconsciously bounding gait of the young. His next chapter hasn’t been written yet. —Kevin McLenithan
★★★☆
The Holdovers is currently in wide theatrical release.
A Still Small Voice
A Still Small Voice follows Mati, a woman working through a year of clinical pastoral education (CPE) as a chaplain-in-residency at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, as well as her boss David, who’s been overseeing chaplain residency cohorts at the hospital for some time. The documentary traces Mati’s time in residency through a year of exhaustion, a record of the burnout inherent in medical and spiritual care, especially in the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hospital chaplains are called to provide comfort for people who are often at the lowest point in their lives, physically and spiritually. Director/cinematographer/editor Luke Lorentzen shoots his movie with the sensitivity and grace to match that calling, finding space for honest contemplation alongside the heavier moments of Mati’s work. The camera hovers around the edges of hospital rooms, rarely showing the patients but often framing the cohort residents as they go about the work of counseling, listening, and praying. Hospitals are spaces for healing the body, and David, Mati, and the other CPE residents often discuss bodily awareness as an act of spiritual care. They’re careful to check in about how present they are in meetings, how they feel physically, where they need care. All of them are running on empty.
Lorentzen’s camera does not pry, but neither does it back away. The film is present in conversations between Mati and her patients, in debriefing meetings with the cohort, in moments of acute and prolonged spiritual crisis. Lorentzen gives just enough information for us to piece together the arc of their year, but not so much that the documentary fits a neat narrative. When Mati says she is exhausted, we get the sense that the whole world is weighing her down. When she and David clash, we understand that the sudden bubbling of emotion has been on the boil for a long time, though we haven’t been able to see anything under their tightly clamped lids until they lose control. The intensity, when it comes, is a surprise. As a viewer, I would have liked for the documentary to signal its story more cleanly, but real life doesn’t work that way. We can’t possibly know exactly how anyone else thinks or feels, ever. The job of a chaplain involves loving people who are, by nature of their station, difficult to love, often through no fault or choice of their own. There has to be room for grace in that. Lorentzen finds that grace in the quiet moments. —Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★☆
A Still Small Voice is in limited release now.