Fleapit revisited:The Holdovers.

December 1970 at a New England all boys boarding school - Barton Academy. Snow lies thick on the ground as most of the wealthy charges return to their families for the Christmas vacation. All that is, except for those known as 'holdovers'. They're the kids that, for one reason or another, have nowhere to go. They'll have to spend the festive season in Barton. As one of the boys succinctly puts it- "the most bullshit ever".

There's just five boys. Teddy Kountze (Brady Hepner), something of a bully and a common or garden racist probably not atypical of the time, Jason Smith (Michael Provost) who's upset his folks by refusing to have his hair cut - it is 1970, and two younger boys:- Alex Ollerman (Ian Dolley), a Mormon kid whose parents are out saving souls in Paraguay, and quiet Ye-Joon Park (Jim Kaplan) whose parents have decided the journey back to Korea is too long for him.

The fifth addition is a late one. Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa - quite remarkably his debut movie), a troubled but talented student, had been expected to be spending the holidays in Saint Kitts with his mum and stepdad so he's very unhappy at being stuck in Barton and even more annoyed at the fact that he'll, along with all the other boys, be looked after by grumpy classics teacher Paul 'Walleye' Hunham (Paul Giamatti).

Hunham is a textbook frustrated intellectual. He obsesses over Pericles, Cicero, and the Pelopennesian War and he dismays of his students, giving them low grades and calling them "lazy, vulgar, rancid little Philistines" and "fetid layabouts". He gives them very low grades as surely as he gives them detentions and he despairs of how privileged they are in life. He's only supervising the holdover period because (a) he's got nowhere else to go and (b) he's being punished by his principal, Dr Hardy Woodrup (Andrew Garman), for failing the son of one the school's most generous donors. A boy he describes, with some relish, as "too dumb to pour piss out of a boot".

When, due to a convenient plot device, Kountze, Smith, Ollerman, and Park all find alternative Christmas plans, we're left with just Walleye and Tully (who have more similarities than they care to admit to each other or, indeed, themselves) and Barton's head cook Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph). Lamb has recently lost her son in Vietnam and is grieving. The fact that the Lambs are a black family should not be lost on the viewer who must surely observe that the rich white Barton boys have ample means to evade the draft. Their lives, it seems - in America 1970, are simply worth more.

It's not a fact that is lost on Walleye. At one point he rages that "the world doesn't make sense anymore. I mean, it's on fire. The rich don't give a shit. Poor kids are cannon fodder. Integrity is a punchline. Trust is just a name on a bank". Less than two years into Nixon's presidency, America was in a pretty sorry, and cynical, state.

Even the most casual observer of current affairs will see echoes in the current situation. Walleye's certainly too learned not to express this when, during a visit to a museum in Boston with Tully which will turn out - of course - to be pivotal to the story, he explains why he is so obsessed with ancient Greece and Rome:- "if you truly want to understand the present, or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present".

The irony being that though Walleye seems to know all there is to know about Marcus Aurelius and the Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage he may not know himself, or his charge - Tully, as well as he thinks. He's a little bit broken. The Barton boys joke about his drinking, his masturbation, and the fact he smells of fish and when he tells Mary he's not sure if he has a whole book in him (he intends, instead, to write a 'monograph') she tells him, in a brilliant line, "you can't even dream a whole dream".

He can't. He's working at the same school he attended as a boy, his principal is a former charge whom he has no respect for, and, as regards his non-existent love life, he remarks "this is not exactly a face forged for romance". When, at a Christmas party he's been badgered into going to by others, he allows himself, privately and briefly, to imagine something happening on that front his hopes are cruelly, yet casually and quietly, shattered. Giamatti's expression at this point is a picture, Giamatti does good hangdog.

To The Holdovers' credit, Mary's story is explored nearly as well as Walleye's and Tully's and she becomes a key character in both their lives while undergoing a very profound period of personal crisis. The only other staff member who stays on during the holdover period appears to be cleaner Danny (Naheem Garcia) and it would have been good to have found out more about him - but at a running length of over two hours anyway perhaps that would not have been possible. 

It's a minor complaint because The Holdovers is a real slow burner of a film. You may not initially warm to any of these characters but as the film develops you find yourself rooting for Tully, for Mary, and even for frustratingly cantankerous old Walleye. You learn more about their lives and, as any decent human being should do, you start to judge less and empathise more. You laugh at their idiosyncrasies and you feel sad when things don't go well for them. This is a film that does a great job of putting you in the action, of making you feel as if these are people you could actually know. By the end of The Holdovers the weight of feelings that have come down during the film must nearly be equal to the weight of snow. Lovely.