The Holdovers’ loveable loser: How Paul Giamatti’s Oscar-tipped film makes us root for the underdog

The ‘Sideways’ actor is tipped to receive an Oscar nomination for his new film ‘The Holdovers’, a festive comedy that marks his latest in a run of down-on-his-luck curmudgeons. Geoffrey Macnab looks at the life and career of an unconventional star always drawn to cinema’s most introverted anti-heroes

Dominic Sessa, Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph in ‘The Holdovers’ (Seacia Pavao)

Mr Hunham, the worn-down, middle-aged teacher played with such consummate brilliance by Paul Giamatti in Alexander Payne’s new film The Holdovers – which has just hit UK cinemas – finds the world a bitter and complicated place. He is an unsympathetic figure despised and feared by the teenagers under his tutelage at Barton Academy, an elite but stuffy boarding school in New England. He smokes a pipe and smells of fish. Cold and supercilious, he is always ready to draw attention to his pupils’ intellectual shortcomings and their privileged and cocooned position in the world. (It’s 1970, and they’re too busy applying to elite colleges to go to Vietnam).

Despite being a self-loathing curmudgeon, Hunham is so beautifully portrayed by Giamatti that audiences will fall in love with him regardless. The actor has also already hoovered up Best Actor wins at the Critics Choice Awards and the Golden Globes, was just nominated for a Bafta and is a lock for at least an Oscar nomination – and potentially a win.

When it comes to bringing underdogs to life on screen, Giamatti – arguably best known for his starring role alongside actor and musician Damian Lewis in the long-running drama series Billions – doesn’t have many peers. The Italian-American actor isn’t anyone’s idea of a typical movie star. Sometimes, though, character actors have such eccentricity and force of personality that they end up eclipsing the leading players. Giamatti has always been one of those.

Hunham shares many traits with the divorced, would-be novelist he played in Payne’s 2004 film Sideways. They’re both deeply disappointed with themselves – furtive, mediocre men who haven’t lived up to their potential. Early on in Sideways, his Miles Raymond is shown stealing money from his mother’s bedroom drawer. He could hardly stoop lower. Moments later, his mother offers him the cash anyway. He is using it so he and his ne’er-do-well actor friend Jack (Thomas Haden Church) can spend a week in “wine country” living it up before Jack gets married.

Both movies work along similar lines. Giamatti gradually reveals the humanity and emotional depth of characters who seem, at first, like truculent losers. In Sideways, Miles is an oenophile. Whenever he is sampling wine, he is suddenly transformed. He talks with authority and enthusiasm about his favourite pinot noir. In The Holdovers, the bad-tempered classics teacher will likewise lose his cynicism the moment he mentions the authors he most admires, prime among them the stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius. In the film, he is forced to more or less babysit a pupil whose parents have abandoned him over the Christmas holidays. This is Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a rebellious but deeply troubled adolescent. Inevitably, the teacher and the student form a bond. Once they overcome their mutual loathing, they bring out the best in one another.

“I don’t think I am that funny,” Giamatti recently said in an interview. “I just try to play the thing as it is supposed to be.” He inadvertently put his finger on just why he’s such an accomplished comedic actor. Giamatti never tries to be ingratiating or to go after easy laughs. Instead, he plays it straight. That said, if there is humour in the writing, he will always somehow extract it. The more earnest he is, the funnier he becomes.

There is a sly, subversive quality to Giamatti in most of his other roles, too. It would be easy to regard his Mr Hunham in The Holdovers as a Scrooge-like misanthrope who gradually rediscovers his humanity – but that would be to undervalue his performance. What he really learns to harness again is his defiance toward authority. “He has easy access to his emotions,” Payne has said. “That’s what good actors have. He’s a brilliant guy, and I don’t use that word lightly. He’s a genuinely brilliant fellow and very sensitive.”

Furtive, mediocre but human: Giamatti in Alexander Payne’s ‘Sideways’ (Shutterstock)

The actor is from a privileged background. His father, A Bartlett Giamatti, was an Ivy League English literature professor and President of Yale University, who later became Commissioner of Major League Baseball. Giamatti Sr was famous-slash-notorious for banning legendary player and coach Pete Rose for life for gambling. Giamatti’s mother was an English teacher. He was privately educated and did his master’s at Yale School of Drama. When he was awarded an honorary degree by Yale earlier this year, the citation for the honour referred to him as “a self-described introvert who has said that he is drawn to characters ‘that nobody pays much attention to’.”

After leaving Yale, he moved to Seattle and tried to make it as an animator but soon discovered he could earn more from acting than from cartoons. He landed multiple bit parts and small character roles in movies and TV dramas: “Man in sleeping bag” in a 1994 episode of NYPD Blue; “FBI Technician” in the Al Pacino gangster movie, Donnie Brasco (1997). Despite a tendency to hang out in the background in these early years, Giamatti experienced his biggest career boost in former radio shock jock Howard Stern’s irreverent and shamelessly vulgar autobiographical comedy Private Parts (1997). He played obnoxious radio executive Kenny “Pig-Vomit” Rushton. “All I knew was that he was supposed to have a stupid southern accent,” Giamatti later confessed to Stern when describing how he approached the role. He didn’t realise that Kenny was based on a real person.

Star-making: Giamatti in 2003’s ‘American Splendor’ (Shutterstock)

One of the advantages of being a character actor was that Giamatti was never typecast. He had played Hamlet on stage and yet would turn up in goofy comedies (2002’s Thunderpants, about a boy who can’t stop farting), Tim Burton fantasies (2001’s Planet of the Apes, in which starred as an orangutan) and indie dramas. The film that catapulted him toward arthouse stardom was Sundance Grand Jury Prize winner American Splendor (2003). He was cast as Harvey Pekar, the underground comic book artist, and was credited by critics with capturing not only the look and sound of the character but his “soul” as well.

Many rate his performance in the Canadian drama Barney’s Version (2010), based on the novel by Mordecai Richler, as even better. He played Barney Panofsky, a balding, charming, indigent alcoholic who – unlike his characters in Sideways and The Holdovers – proves irresistible to women.

Although Giamatti has been seen on screen several times as uptight, repressed teachers and writers, he is also just as good at playing street hustlers. Think of his role as Russell Crowe’s dogged manager in Ron Howard’s Depression-era boxing drama Cinderella Man (2005). Then there have been Giamatti’s villains: the thoroughly repellent slave trader Theophilus Freeman in Steve McQueen’s Oscar-winner 12 Years A Slave (2013), or as a ruthless, gun-toting hitman in the Clive Owen thriller Shoot ‘Em Up (2007).

Critic Roger Ebert once wrote of the actor’s brilliance at playing “unremarkable but memorable men”. That’s Giamatti’s trick, taking minor characters and giving them unexpected layers of complexity.

When it comes to next year’s awards race, Giamatti has strong competition, up against actors who all give bigger, showier performances as major historical characters. Mr Hunham doesn’t win the Battle of Austerlitz, or invent an atomic bomb – he’s an obscure school teacher with hygiene issues and no friends. Nonetheless, when it comes to nuance and pathos, the other contenders can’t touch him.

‘The Holdovers’ is in cinemas