It’s a well-known fact that historians generally don’t like historical fiction. Movies set in past periods of history, “based on real events” or not, generally put our teeth on edge. Such fictions are ordinarily filled with ridiculous anachronisms. The anachronisms are most obvious when mushy modern phrases from our therapeutic culture—urging us to share our feelings or hoping we are comfortable with this or that—are put in the mouths of Roman legionaries or medieval churchmen. The producers of British costume dramas are generally brilliant at providing exact reconstructions of the physical environment and costumes used in, say, Jane Austin’s Bath, but they are less accurate when it comes to reconstructing her lost linguistic and conceptual world. I’m sure it sounds stuffy to non-historians when those of us in the trade get annoyed over anachronisms in historical fiction and films. But there’s a method to our miffedness. 

To pursue the discipline of history, we tell our students, requires ceaseless vigilance against anachronism. You can’t tell true stories about the past or describe past times or explain why things happened as they did back then without rigorously excluding the false expectations we bring with us from the present. A classic example is the tendency to forget, when dealing with pre-modern societies, how impoverished, violent, and unhealthy life was for at least 90 percent of the population before the West was enriched by the Industrial Revolution. When I was a graduate student in the 1970s we were given Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age to read, which was meant to impress upon us the enormous differences between the way ordinary English families lived in the seventeenth century and the way we live now. Another blast from the past came from the economic historian Carlo Cipolla’s Before the Industrial Revolution: European Society and Economy, which presented an extraordinarily vivid picture of how difficult it was to survive into old age in premodern Europe. A book I assign my own students now which performs a similar function is Patricia Crone’s Pre-industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Premodern World. This brilliant work ranges around the globe and across 5,000 years to illustrate what life was like when most people had to grow their own food (or seize it from others), how premodern governments worked (or didn’t), and the indispensable role of religion in keeping communities from falling apart. One comfort that arises from studying such books is that we historians are better able to discount the alarmists when they announce, on almost a daily basis now, that America—or the West—is on the point of collapse owing to one or another crisis that is upon us. Yes, things are bad, but not nearly as bad as they were for most people for the first 2,500 years of Western history.

Hollywood, however, in recent years seems determined to deprive us of even the minimal historical sensitivity that used to be imbibed from its blockbuster historical epics of the past, like Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments or Cleopatra. I recently was compelled by familial force majeure to watch the Netflix television series Vikings: Valhalla. After a while I had to ask myself: Now that nobody is teaching Western civ anymore, is the next generation really going to grow up believing that Viking communities in Denmark were led by black women or that Viking men cooked dinner for their warrior wives in the forests of Scandinavia? This sort of gaslighting is de rigueur in Hollywood these days, and it has been widely reported that a treatment that doesn’t make appropriate offerings to the gods of intersectionality won’t find funding from the major studios. 

So it was positively astonishing, almost the next day after watching the woke Valhalla, to stumble across The Holdovers (on Prime), a film by Alexander Payne released last summer with little fanfare. It’s a gentle human comedy about a teacher, played by Paul Giamatti, who gets stuck over the Christmas holidays on the campus of a fictitious New England boarding school, Barton Academy, supervising a small group of boys who are not able to return home to their families over the two-week break. The year is 1970 and the Vietnam war is still raging. The movie filled me with a bittersweet nostalgia precisely because its makers had taken great pains to avoid anachronisms of any kind, even verbal or conceptual ones, despite the risk of offending woke sensitivities. I was fifteen on the dramatic date of the film, and everything in it rang true to me. I found few anachronisms to complain about, apart from the foul language used by some of the adults, which surely would have been out of character in 1970 for devout Catholic women or Harvard-educated prep school teachers. I suppose Hollywood can no longer imagine what the speech of decent people sounds like. But apart from that, the world of the film impressed me as truly the world we have lost. 

The film is built around a clash of personalities between a teacher, Paul Hunham (Giamatti), and one of his charges, Angus Tully. Hunham is a socially awkward, slightly wall-eyed man who, owing to a congenital digestive ailment, smells faintly of fish. He teaches ancient history and is hated by the students as a ruthless disciplinarian and taskmaster, a reputation he revels in. He is famous for having flunked the son of a senator, whose offer to attend Princeton was rescinded after failing Paul’s class. On day six of the Christmas holidays, four of the five holdovers are whisked away in a helicopter owned by one of the boys’ wealthy father. The fifth boy, Angus Tully, a rebellious misfit played by Dominic Sessa, is unable to contact his parents and has to stay behind. This sets up a comedic war between Paul and Angus which drives the rest of the film. Witness to their encounter is a black head cook, Mary Lamb, wonderfully played by Da’Vine Joy Randolph. She is deep in grief following the recent loss of her only son, who had been a scholarship boy at Barton but was drafted and killed in Vietnam. Randolph won the film’s only Oscar, for Best Supporting Actress, for her interpretation of Mary Lamb’s distinctive combination of humor, sympathy, and simple moral dignity.

The coming cultural collapse is only just visible in the little world of Barton Academy in 1970. All the male students and teachers wear jackets and ties, and discipline is still largely intact. There is no grade inflation and students are expected to master difficult historical texts such as Thucydides—the whole book, not just excerpts. No one expresses the slightest doubt that the material is worth learning. No one in authority is embarrassed by the word “Christmas” and no one feels the need to substitute “the holidays.” (In the final assembly of the term, a good-natured quip that there might be some students in the school celebrating a different holiday, meaning Hanukkah, draws a few chuckles.) 

But there are clouds on the horizon. Angus has been abandoned by his mother because she has responded to the expressive individualism of the ’60s and is determined to pursue her own happiness, no matter how much damage she does to her family. The Vietnam draft has opened up a rift between boys who can afford college and win deferments and poorer boys who have to go and risk their lives. In 1970, that rift has only just started to widen into the gap that today separates the privileged from non-elites. 

The counterculture has not yet taken hold in 1970. Among the five student holdovers is a long-haired hippy type, Teddy Kountze (Brady Hepner), also the school’s drug dealer, who makes racist jokes about the one Asian student; this just makes the other boys, who are better bred, uncomfortable. Gentlemanly standards are still enough to squelch his ugly behavior; there is no need for a DEI apparatus to compel ideological conformity. Tellingly, Teddy also displays a certain arriviste snobbery when he objects to Paul’s democratic suggestion that Mary should join the small table of holdovers for dinner. Mary considers, but noting Teddy’s truculent expression, quietly decides to eat by herself. Hunham then angrily dresses Teddy down for his boorish behavior.

Paul may be a stuffed shirt who attended Harvard but one of the pleasant memories the film evokes is the relative absence of class consciousness in the post-war era of American life. The school population mostly gets along easily with the townies. When Paul, Angus, Mary, and the janitor Danny get invited to a Christmas Eve party in town, everyone interacts on an equal basis, and the service staff don’t adopt deferential attitudes to their putative social superiors. The film has a number of characters in it who are simply good in the old-fashioned, American way. They know instinctively what is decent behavior, how to put each other at ease, and how to defuse awkward situations. The plot turns on the unexpected performance, in the course of Paul and Angus’ combative relationship, of pure acts of kindness and generosity towards each other, acts which change them both for the better. 

The plot of the film is expertly managed so that the broad theme of how institutional discipline is internalized in students gradually narrows to a personal confrontation between Paul and Angus. This leads, in an entirely convincing way, to both characters undermining their own carefully constructed personas and a splendid, unexpected act of moral courage and generosity on Paul’s part at the end of the film. It is hard to imagine a humane relationship of this sort blossoming in a modern prep school, with its strict regimes designed to prevent intimacies of any kind between teachers and students. I am not sure whether it was the intention of Alexander Payne (who was seven years old in 1970) and his colleagues and backers to show us an older America that in many ways is far more admirable than the present. If they did, they were wise not to signal it and risk losing the support of Hollywood’s woke studios. Whatever their intentions, they have given us a richly enjoyable reminder of better times and more humane institutions of learning.