Went to see The Holders because reviews are favorable but I didn't care for the movie. Character storylines did not develop although they had the potential for doing so which made it that more frustrating to watch. I didn't seem to get a moral or a point to the story. The movie is downbeat, cynical, and shallow but is supposedly a Christmas classic in the making. Huh?? I'm still trying to figure out how a movie well over 2 hrs long failed to develop into anything satisfying but it just didn't.
It also takes place during Christmas1970 and although it has obvious 1970 ques like old tv sets in background and music playing it oddly felt like it was not 1970s but modern day. I don't know how they messed that up either as I didn't feel transported to another time.
Edit: after thinking about this movie for a few days a major sour point came to mind. The school cook who is a black woman lost her son in Vietnam war and he was the only student of the school to die in Vietnam. The point is made or at least implied it's because he was a poor black and not a rich white kid. Well, it seems 86% of US casualties were white 12% black. In the movie his last name is Lamb as in 'sacrificial lamb' perhaps and must've been because he was underprivileged poor black. And we only experience him in the movie as a tragic face hung on the wall in the school. A one dimensional prop to serve the point of how bad our country is. We never get to know what kind of person he was, we only see the grief his mother displays and a dour looking portrait of him.
Apparently, malevolent rich white people are to blame for all of our problems according to this movie. Giamatti's character was stuck teaching at Barton for 30 years or so because some rich guy screwed him over back when he was in school. So it made him a cynical guy with a drinking problem who treated his students poorly all those years!? Leave it to rich white Hollywood to blame other rich white people for the world's problems while making tons of money doing so lol.
Plz Hollywood, stop spoon feeding us garbage!