‘The Holdovers’: Alexander Payne Goes Back To School With Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph And Newcomer Dominic Sessa
20.12.2023 - 18:14
/ deadline.com
Back in 2004, during a press tour for Sideways — Alexander Payne’s wine-soaked buddy movie starring Paul Giamatti as a depressive divorcé — the filmmaker and the actor were in Omaha in front of an audience.
In a moment of showmanship, Payne whipped out a local phone book, declaring Giamatti so skilled, he could make even that sound interesting. And sure enough, as Giamatti recited the listings, he brought the house down. “Thanks for rolling with that stunt,” Payne tells Giamatti now, some 20 years later, in a New York City hotel room, where they are, once again, on a press tour.
The film reuniting them is The Holdovers and Payne designed Giamatti’s role just for him. Paul Hunham is a beleaguered Classics professor at Barton Academy, a New England boarding school steeped in history and privilege. Like Giamatti’s Sideways character, Hunham also likes a drink (more on that later), but the other throughline is a theme Payne’s films have often favored — something The Holdovers screenwriter David Hemingson calls “quiet heroism”.
Nobody likes the wall-eyed and odiferous Hunham, yet on he soldiers, railing against his pupils’ entitlement, a curmudgeonly Scrooge doling out homework for the Christmas break. He believes in his teaching mission and will get it done, regardless the effect on his own popularity.
Payne recalls his own version of Hunham from childhood — a “prick Latin teacher” from his Jesuit school. “Father Michael Hindelang. A magnificent Saint Prick. He made kids cry in class. It was a centuries-old method of, how do you say the word? Pedagogy?”
Payne thought of him often during filming. “The moment class was over, and you talked to him, he was the nicest guy. So, it was, ‘You’re willing to be f*cking hated in