Barton men

Honor and mercy are the Hallmarks of The Holdovers

Would it be reductive to say Alexander Payne makes Hallmark movies for high-class people? Since he veered from the sharper satirical mode of Citizen Ruth and Election, his movies have been about the sort of self- and destiny-discovering that we usually get from sentimental TV movies.

The difference (besides budgets and star power) is that Payne writes and picks writers better — and he sticks pretty close to a recognizable literary model, namely the mid-list novel adaptations that used to be the bread and butter of American prestige filmmaking. You know: Characters, crisis, and catharsis, pitched down the middle with some laughs and no alienating modernism. You could say both Payne and Hallmark are about lessons in life and love, but Hallmark is about L in L&L as a brand, while Payne’s is the real thing.

The Holdovers, his latest — a Christmas movie, just like several hundred on the Hallmark Channel now! — is certainly pitched right down my middle, with its early 70s boy’s school setting, its absent father, and New England. The film’s Barton Academy is much classier than my prep was; it’s a rural Massachusetts boarding school where the very rich send their sons, often (it appears) to get their lame asses out of their sight. But it has a grand campus — snow-covered, as the movie opens on the eve of Christmas break, with a spectacular chapel and dining hall, though the dorms and classrooms are shopworn and dreary; clearly prestige rather than education and comfort is Barton’s selling point. The boys wear button-down shirts, with sport jackets and ties in class and chapel, and have the extra sass that comes from privilege leavened with resentment.

This is somewhat in the territory of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore, and I think Payne is aware of and leverages that; he even lards in old pop music cues as Anderson did (one of which, Cat Stevens’ “The Wind,” was also in Rushmore). But where this gave the earlier film the feeling of a fable, it gives The Holdovers a nostalgic tinge, and a suggestion of introversion, as if the events were being remembered rather than enacted.

The petty tyrant ancient-civ teacher, Paul Hunham, is of a type just barely hanging on at that time and pretty much extinct today: The fusty, pipe-chewing, embattled exemplar of old school values and tradition who, if he can’t turn the little “troglodytes” in his charge into “Barton men” — men of honor, of integrity, who can not only remember their Cicero but understand it — will at least let them know what they’re falling short of. If Barton is, like Rushmore Academy, another world, a memory world, Hunham is the living ghost who haunts it.

Unlike the few remaining and less-charming knockoff versions such as Roger Kimball, however, Hunham is very much for real: He clings to both the axioms and the principles of the ancient Greeks and refuses to compromise; in fact, he recently cost the school some money by refusing to pass a Senator’s lunkhead son. The headmaster, who is content to Change With The Times (read: sell out, and sever the last remaining connection with the school’s original mission), is itching to get rid of him. No one else would much mind if he did; Hunham is prickly with colleagues as well as students, plus he has strabismus and he smells.

Barton junior Angus Tully doesn’t have a lot of support, either; he’s alienated from family and classmates, using his considerable intelligence to build verbal walls against the pain they cause him, and has been kicked out of two other schools already (which is why he has a year or two on his classmates, heightening his alienation); if it happens again, he goes to a military academy and loses the protection that privilege affords him from the waning days of the Vietnam War. A recent Barton graduate has just been killed in it — the son of the school’s cafeteria manager, Mary, whose position got him into Barton but didn’t pay enough for college and a deferment. Mary is one of the very few black people in town; she spends her nights watching game shows and trying to hold it together.

Circumstances, some of them very funny, keep Hunham, Angus, and Mary on campus during Christmas break. While Mary has a bond with Hunham and a mild animosity toward “little assholes” like Angus, it’s Hunham’s and Angus’ relationship that gets the workout. You can sort of guess how that goes, generally — and you will not be surprised to learn that, as Hunham and Angus warm toward and learn to trust one another, dramatic revelations (which, don’t worry, I won’t spoil here) explode like depth charges along the way, spurred by physical accident, chance meetings, dropped pill bottles, and so forth.

It’s Sardou and Scribe all the way. (The way Mary works out some of her grief, by the way, is a little well-made-play of its own.) But a few things make it more than a clever, Hallmarky way to get us to care and pay attention for two hours.

First, while the revelations are clearly meant to put us in sympathy with each of the characters, they’re also a little more dire than they need to be for that purpose; in fact, in addition to sympathy, they actually generate some horror. Angus’ situation, we learn (particularly in a step-parental visit) is even sadder than it looks, and Hunham’s… well, let’s just say we not only come to understand his lack of faith in the world’s justice, but to share it — the barbarians have already breached his gates. These people are not troubled and trammeled by misunderstandings or poor coping skills, they’re traumatized by tragic personal events that would make it hard for anyone, including us, to go out and face the world again.

And that’s the other thing: What makes them able to face the world is their willingness to face themselves — and they only get that because they’ve been forced to face each other. Sometimes it’s a story extracted under comic duress (“entre nous” becomes a catchphrase), sometimes it’s just friendly truth-or-dare. But neither of these men would have heard his own story if the other hadn’t made him say it out loud. The lesson is that the honor Hunham extols — sincerely as he means it — requires more courage than either he or Angus has, and building their relationship is how both of them build that courage.

But Hunham, being the adult, has the bigger job (a mission of mercy, really) and the bigger price to pay — and the lesser chance that his payment will be redeemed down the road. The closing section is a kind of callback to the conclusion of the previous Payne-Paul Giamatti collaboration, Sideways. Unlike in that film, though, there is no half-promised prize of a dream girl luring the character on — only stark necessity and blank pages. The Holdovers is sentimental, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t tough.