Alexander Payne’s heart-tugging Christmas movie “The Holdovers” has been building upbeat word of mouth since it wowed crowds at Telluride, was runner-up at TIFF for the People’s Choice Award, and pulled audiences back to theaters ($18 million domestic).
Which is why it’s likely to score a scad of Oscar nominations. Payne has been nominated three times for Best Director and won twice for Adapted Screenplay (“Sideways” and “The Descendants”), but “The Holdovers” marks the feature-screenwriting debut of sitcom veteran David Hemingson, the sole credited writer on the film.
Payne’s lead actors usually land nominations, although Paul Giamatti was robbed for 2004’s “Sideways.” (He’s been nominated only once, two years later, for “Cinderella Man.”) Now Academy voters have a chance to show their love for Giamatti, who is in rare form in “The Holdovers” as a hidebound prep school professor playing against rookie Dominic Sessa as a rebellious student, and wily veteran Da’Vine Joy Randolph as the school cook who buffers their pain while dealing with the loss of her soldier son in Vietnam.
Not unlike the wine maven he portrayed in “Sideways,” Giamatti plays an isolated man who masks his insecurity with wit. “They’re certainly cousin characters,” Payne told me during a recent interview.
That sense of kinship extends to his bond with Giamatti. “We have a good shared sensibility and a strong sense that we’re making the same movie together,” the filmmaker said. “I felt that 20 years ago with ‘Sideways’ and I felt it again now. For me as a director, and with these screenplays, he’s somehow the perfect vessel of tone. He can do comic things dramatically, and dramatic things with great comic panache. Were I to make movies quickly enough to have an alter ego actor as have many great directors, it would be him.”
Giamatti likes the sentiment. “If that were the case, nothing would make me happier than to just do movies with him,” he said during our own recent Zoom interview.
The movie’s most entertaining scenes pit the professor against the student. “One thing that the movie has in common with ‘Sideways’ is that Paul is a phenomenal lead and also a phenomenal team player,” said Payne. “The friendship that he was able to forge on screen with Thomas Haden Church 20 years ago — they were two disparate human beings as actors and then two disparate characters. That’s fine work by both actors to find that and make that work. Same thing here, too. Here’s Mr. Experienced with Mr. Fresh-Off-the-Boat actor and Dominic’s got the chops, as untrained as he is, but Paul — this sounds corny — is a generous actor in that he, when you’re looking at him, what he gives you is 100 percent real. It makes his interlocutor feel ‘realer’ and there’s good chemistry between the two.”
Two decades ago, when Giamatti auditioned live with Payne for “Sideways,” he read just one driving scene with the Thomas Haden Church character. “I thought: ‘This is great,’” the actor said. “And then quite a bit of time went by before, suddenly, my agent called and said, ‘They want to put you in this movie.’ … I don’t even know what the hell the movie is about. What’s the part?”
“It’s one of the leads.”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about it until it got offered to me. I thought, ‘A movie all about wine? Is anybody going to care?’ But I was more than happy to do it because I’m getting to do it with [Payne].”
On the set of “Sideways,” Giamatti said that he and Church had “a really intense sense that we were gonna get fired: ‘This can’t possibly actually last very long. They’re going to realize they’ve made a mistake very early on, and get rid of us.’ We were bonded in, ‘what the hell are we doing here?’”
Any changes in Payne’s shooting scripts happen during rehearsals. “And he’ll add it to the script,” said Giamatti. “He’s not averse to it. If you do something that he thinks is funny, he will then go, ‘Oh, that’s good. Keep that.’” One example: during rehearsals for “The Holdovers,” Giamatti’s grumpy professor turned to Dominic Sessa’s grumpy teenager and said, ‘Bravo, Mr. Tully, bravo!” Payne said, “I’ll keep that.”
For the most part, though, Payne’s actors keep to the screenplay. “Because the script is really good,” said Giamatti. “You don’t need to mess around with it. It’ll give you everything you need. [Payne]’s capable, he creates the most intimate, warm, friendly atmosphere. You feel like you’re hanging out with this guy, and all these wonderful people, and you happen to be making a movie. He only will give you direction if he feels he has to, which is rare. Lots of people feel that it’s their job to give you direction, so they start giving you direction and you don’t need it. They can confuse the issue. He knows how to talk to each person that way they need to be talked to. If somebody doesn’t want to talk about it at all, like me, he can do that. So he can accommodate you. Then you feel like you’re in completely safe hands.”
He added, “From the second you start, there’s never a bump in the road. Nothing ever seems to go wrong. Because it doesn’t for him, nothing can go wrong. He may be panicking inside.”
Giamatti was amazed by how easy it was to act with newbie Deerfield drama student Sessa. “Both Alexander and I looked at that kid and thought, ‘He’ll be able to bring this. He doesn’t need much work to get where he needs to get.’ I did a little session with him, just to see what he was like,” Giamatti said. “I didn’t give him any big thoughts or anything, and it immediately put him in the right place. He was easy to work with, focused and fun and flexible. There was a way in which his freshness and newness to it was great for me, the jaded old pro. He would advocate for his character and be more thoughtful in ways that I’ve forgotten. I’m a little Mr. Old Hack. There were times when he’d slow it down so I thought, ‘Oh, that’s smart.’”
Since the movie wrapped, Sessa graduated from high school, studied theater at Carnegie Mellon, and is experiencing his first go-round on the promo circuit. Giamatti is not worried about his future. “He’s grounded, on the level of genuinely not hiding anything,” he said. “He’s a level-headed guy. He’s just taking it easy and being himself.”
“The Holdovers,” like all of Payne’s movies, is constantly shifting gears from slapstick, with Giamatti chasing his errant student down the hall, to deep emotion. “Somehow it works,” said Giamatti. “His movies can get very broad and then somehow come back down. And it doesn’t seem weird. I’m trying to chip stuff off the window. It gets crazy and huge, like a cartoon. Somehow he pulls that off.”
How does he do that? “He picks the right actors,” said Giamatti. “I’m not the only one that has the tone of it. He picked other people that got the tone of it too. It’s that ’70s thing, too. I understand those movies. He loves those movies so I get what it was supposed to be.”
Giamatti’s other co-star Randolph attended Yale about a decade after he did. She provides the emotional glue that brings the triangle of characters together at a moving Christmas dinner.
“She’s a fantastic actress,” said Giamatti. “And I’d seen her doing other funny stuff. I knew she would deliver. The writing was so natural. And that was well into the process of shooting the movie. So we’ve been together for a while. There was such a level of comfort. And then we’re eating really good food. It felt like it’s such a beautiful moment, the three of those people open to each other. You had this wonderful sense of intimacy on the set, and in the movie between us.”
The movie speaks to Christmas orphans everywhere, people who feel lonely or abandoned or misunderstood during the holidays. “Christmas was a whole other thing after my father died,” said Giamatti. “I can remember the first one after: ‘Oh, boy, this is not the same thing is it?’ There’s something about getting to the depths of winter and it feels very melancholy and it’s about renewal, trying to move forward. It’s heavy stuff.”
The actor resists any suggestion that Payne is manipulating the audience. “He withholds,” said Giamatti. “The great thing that he always does is it’s not like everybody suddenly is a new person at the end. They’re not. They move forward a bit. But I don’t know where they’re going to go from here. The guy I played takes the mask off a bit, but not entirely. He’s still the same guy.”
The professor and student, when they make their farewells at the end of the film, do not hug. Did they shoot it that way? “I think we did it,” said Giamatti. “Somebody suggested we hug after we let the firecracker off. And I [felt], ‘Absolutely not. No way. We can’t hug.’ I don’t know that it was ever spoken. The thing we discovered was the shaking hands. But you couldn’t hug now. It’s the opposite of a different kind of manipulation. It’s not letting you have the ending with the big, misty hug. But it’s not a terrible ending for them.”
Why is “The Holdovers” playing so well with audiences? “It is a small, intimate ensemble, a character study, that you don’t see a ton of,” said Giamatti. “But it’s done in an appealing, accessible way. People are connecting to this simple story of a found family, and a simple demonstration of empathy and the compassion people have for each other. And people love that British prep school thing, ‘Harry Potter’ is that stuff. It is a Christmas movie. But it’s the simple, compassionate thing between these three very disparate people.”
During the actors’ strike, which he enthusiastically supported, Giamatti was ready to rest up after seven years of playing the hard-charging lawyer in “Billions.” “I was just finished,” he said. “It was frustrating, because I wanted to talk about this movie. But I have to say, I loved seeing the directors, the writers, the designers, the editors, being the people fronting for it. You’re seeing the people who were the team who put the thing together, and in the most real way.”
Up next: Giamatti is still adjusting to life after Chuck vs. Axe on “Billions,” which has finally finished its seven-year run. “It was an amazing job,” he said. “And I’ve made a lot of good friends on it. I loved doing it. I don’t know that I’m going to miss that part, I’m not gonna lie to you, because it was a tough part to play. It was not a pleasant person to play, because he’s just a bastard in a lot of ways. The finale was interesting: it was not a bloodbath the way everybody thought it was gonna be.”
His other television role is continuing into a third final season: Max’s Spanish horror series “30 Coins.” “If you like horror,” said Giamatti, “it’s great.”
“The Holdovers” is in theaters and streaming exclusively on Peacock.
