Holdovers On Metabolizing Pain
What happens when 3 souls with sorrow are stuck together with each other over Christmas break?
In Holdovers, Paul, the teacher, starts sublimating his pain by making life miserable for the students around him. Can Paul change? What would it take for Paul to change?
Holdovers centers on 3 people who have experienced significant loss in their lives. Mary, the cook, lost her son. Tully lost his father. Paul is spewing vitriol in a private school he teaches history at while grieving past betrayal.
It is perhaps not surprising that Paul admires Marcus Aurelius' meditations, giving them as Christmas gifts. He says it gives all the wisdom one needs without even mentioning God once.
Ostensibly, the stoic ethic is lauded at the private boarding school Barton. A symptom of the stoic ethic is the stiff upper lip. The process of the stoic ethic is to metabolize painful life experiences in silence and sarcasm.
Mary's pain is in the losing her only son, Curtis, in the Vietnam war. She spends her time cooking for the school her son attended, Barton. That is her life's purpose now.
Angus' pain is in losing his father, and being abandoned by his mother and step father during the Christmas break.
Paul's pain is complex. He grew up poor, though with a keen intellect that showed a lot of potential. However, just as his career could have taken off, it got scuttled by the system that is tailored for rich brats to succeed. As fate would have it Paul is teaching rich brats at Barton, hence his vitriol and caustic curmudgeon-ism.
The question of the story is 'How can they find healing to their pain?'
The stoic answer is perhaps to accept the pain with the stiff upper lip. The problem with the stiff upper lip approach is that the internal pain spews out in sarcasm if not sociopathy.
The movie's redemptive arch emerges as the trio find their healing in their mutual acceptance. Mary gently suggests that Paul could try to approach Angus with empathy.
Instead of seeing Angus as a nuisance that got in the way of his Christmas reading, Paul comes to see Angus as a confused young man needing affirmation and guidance.
This healing community is not about mere acceptance. Mere acceptance isn't enough. Acceptance ought to be accompanied by honesty about true self. If not, it becomes false acceptance. What makes Holdovers satisfying is in observing the trio be honest about their true past.
Paul, being a history nerd and teacher, takes Angus to a museum and says, only when we understand the past we can makes sense of the present. The irony being that he is not honest about his own past. He remains a prisoner of his past, which keeps him bound to Barton.
One of the most moving parts of the movie is when Paul and Angus encounter their past. Both Christian theology and Stoicism value this encounter with the truth of oneself. But they differ is in the role of community and painful emotions play in the process of healing. Stoicism attempts to use reason to keep painful emotions at bay. Christianity has a positive view of emotions, even attributing negative emotions to God himself.
Emotions are central to human well being. Karl Lehman is a psychiatrist who says that the emotional health of an adult is dependent on our ability to process their painful emotions. Creating a safe space in the community to process pain is important. This concept aligns with apostle Paul's exhortation in the Bible to share one another's burdens. Christian view of Trinity, symbolizing three persons in one God, underscores the value of community.
The most cathartic parts of this movie is when Paul and Angus get to be honest with each other about their own pain. Paul slowly become a sort of a Father figure who turns a Christ figure willing to risk life and limb for Angus. Mary too finds healing for her inconsolable pain in connection with her pregnant sister who promises that if her new born child would be male, Curtis would be his middle name.
The movie starts with Paul as an angry man, drowning his pain in alcohol and vitriol. The movie resists finding romance as an easy salve to his pain. Instead it attempts to help people find resolution through honesty, acceptance and facing the truth of their past. The last scene of the movie is Paul taking a swing of liquor and spitting it out, setting Paul on a new journey.