The Real Antidote to Despair

Whether it’s a preacher, an author or a songwriter, it is often a revelatory experience when you feel like someone is speaking directly to you. Amidst an ocean of other people, the speaker somehow offers insight that suggests they were in your bedroom the night before (or perhaps your car that morning), as if God himself is telling you something through a catalyst. While a blanket statement for the masses may be generally relatable, it is often too blunt to make an emotional impact; but when a peculiar detail is mentioned, it makes you feel personally known, and sought after. In order to penetrate the human heart, one must be precise.

In an industry dominated by superhero plotlines, it feels rare to personally identify with a movie these days. And yet, throughout the surprise Christmas classic The Holdovers, I felt like I had a target on my back. Within the first five minutes of the film, the camera happened to zoom in on my exact high school dorm room window. Other scenes featured classrooms and hallways easily recognizable from those formative adolescent years — the river I swam in, the quad where I spent many afternoons throwing a frisbee with friends. I felt like my life was being played out on a screen. Was this a movie made just for me?

Judging by the outpouring of reviews, apparently not. The Holdovers has been triumphed as a Christmas movie worthy of canonization. What sets it apart is its recognition of a season that is mostly celebrated as joyous but all too often marked by loneliness and despair. The film is a closeup of the darkness into which the light of Jesus was sent to shine.

The movie revolves around Mr. Paul Hunham (played by Paul Giamatti), a miserable, hidebound, unwavering classics professor at Barton Academy, an all boys’ New England boarding school he once attended. Days before Christmas Break (the year is 1970), Mr. Hunham is told that he will be supervising six students who have nowhere to go for the holidays (i.e. the holdovers), including Angus Tully whose mother has abandoned him to honeymoon with her new husband. After a student’s father comes to the rescue, whisking five of the boys off in a helicopter to join their family ski trip, Angus is left alone with Mr. Hunham. The only other soul on Barton’s campus is the cafeteria administrator, Mary Lamb, who is grieving the loss of her son killed in Vietnam earlier that year. And then there were three: a mother in mourning, an embittered student, and a vindictive professor make for a holy trinity of misery. Consider it the bleakest of midwinters.

After years of teaching the classics to no avail, Mr. Hunham believes his students to be “lazy, vulgar, rancid little Philistines,” all born with silver spoons in their mouths and all expecting to skate by their entire lives. He considers it his calling to beat these fortunate sons into hardworking devotees of ancient history. Thus, the antidote to entitlement is academic and moral integrity. The solution for misbehavior is detention. As film critic Richard Brody said, “He’s a teacher of his subject, not a teacher of his students, not least because he takes them to be spoiled rich kids.” In turn, he sacrifices the joy of learning at the altar of rules and pedanticism. Everything — even camaraderie — is in “strict accordance with the dictates of the school manual,” as if the boys exist for the manual and not the other way around.

Hunham’s approach to discipline is textbook stoicism. Every year, he gives copies of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations out as Christmas presents. “For my money, it’s like the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita all rolled up into one. And the best part is not one mention of God!” he says, proudly. Hunham’s philosophy is centered around the idea that hardship creates perseverance and that the chief end of life is self-mastery and self-control. As much as I loved my own high school experience, I could not help but think that Hunham is making explicit what is often implicit in our world, not only in our education system but our society as a whole. As Benjamin Franklin said, “There are no gains without pains.” Even the church succumbs to the philosophy that people only change through hard work and discipline, often without even a mention of the forgiveness of sins or rest for the weary. There is a 19th century ethos of learning that pervades all corners of life today — career, parenting, exercise, leisure. It all adds up to a militarized valorization of Greek ordeals that turns everything into a boot camp. And, as Hunham boasts, there’s rarely even one mention of God.

And yet, all the while, God is a constant presence in The Holdovers. The very first words of the film are “In the beginning was the Word” (followed by a sacred hymn sung by the Barton Boys Choir). Mary, the single mother grieving the loss of her murdered son (an eerily similar character description to another certain Mary) is a constant companion. While her terrible loss makes it difficult to feel sorry for any boy bored on Christmas break, she does not hold their privilege against them. At the beginning of Christmas Break, while Mr. Hunham hosts an exhaustive boot camp for the six boys, Mary asks him how they are doing, to which he replies, “Broken in body and spirit,” with smug satisfaction. When she suggests that he goes easy on them he fires back, “Oh, please. They’ve had it easy their whole lives,” to which she responds, “You don’t know that. Do you?” Later, she is proven right after Angus confides in them that his father had recently died. As the rain falls on the just and the unjust, so does sorrow and suffering fall on the haves and the have-nots.

Until that point, Mr. Hunham had seen the world as a war between the privileged and the under-privileged. His weapon of choice? Strict moral discipline. To his surprise, however, he is ambushed by a counter-attack of grace. When Angus dislocates his arm after being chased around campus by Mr. Hunham, he tells a lie to a hospital worker in order to protect Hunham from blame. Once out of the doctor’s earshot, the scandalized Hunham says, “Barton men don’t lie!” When he realizes that Angus told the lie for his own sake, Hunham begins to soften. He begins to turn a blind eye when Angus joins him for an off-campus Christmas party or when Angus sets off an indoor firework to celebrate New Years Eve. Any corners cut or misdeeds dark fall under the term entre nous or “between us.” By the end of the film, nearly everything is entre nous as if their relationship is the only judgment-free zone each of them have in life. All the while, Angus begins to flourish as a boy.

By the film’s end, Hunham has laid to rest his need to exact justice on the privileged elite, measure for measure. And, by some strange miracle, he has succeeded in shaping the character of precisely one of his students. Not by browbeating the school manual into the boy’s head, however, but by bestowing grace. Hunham even ends up taking the fall for something Angus could rightfully be expelled for, undoubtedly a moment that will shape the boy’s life forever. Privileged as he may be, Hunham’s sacrifice feels like the first time Angus has ever actually felt loved.

Thankfully, in my own experience, the hallowed halls through which Angus walked were not impervious to the love of God. Those same halls were where I first heard the gospel in a way that shaped my own life. In the same room in which Hunham pummeled Meditations into those poor boys, I heard a youth minister tell me of a wondrous alternative to the self-made approach to life; that we are saved not by our own suffering, but that of Another. That, in Jesus, everything is entre nous between us and God. It was a message appropriate for the masses, but somehow I felt like it was spoken directly to me.