Every Christmas movie has to have its scrooge. In Alexander Payne’s holiday-set dramedy The Holdovers, the curmudgeon is Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), a long-time teacher at Barton Academy, an elite Massachusetts boarding school. Paul treats the affluent students in his ancient history class with contempt, gleefully terrorizing them with poor grades in order to trip up their otherwise smooth rides to fancy colleges. He’s the kind of teacher who flunks almost everyone on their end-of-semester exam and then assigns the class extra homework over the holidays as prep for yet another exam as soon as they get back. Bah humbug, indeed.
It’s not just the students at Barton who loathe Paul. So does the school’s administration. Hence Paul being saddled with holdover duty over the winter break—that is, to supervise any students who, for whatever reason, can’t go on lavish vacations like the rest of their peers,...
It’s not just the students at Barton who loathe Paul. So does the school’s administration. Hence Paul being saddled with holdover duty over the winter break—that is, to supervise any students who, for whatever reason, can’t go on lavish vacations like the rest of their peers,...
- 9/16/2023
- by Mark Hanson
- Slant Magazine
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