admin At first, Paul and Angus are at each other’s throats. Paul would rather be spending his time alone, reading Marcus Aurelius; Angus would rather be hanging out in Saint Kitts. Their animosity comes to a head when Angus goes on a spree throughout the school’s halls with Paul chasing after him. It’s a perfect example of Giamatti physical comedy. A perpetually tipsy pipe smoker, Paul is not in the best of shape, and he lags behind Angus, bellowing and puffing.
Angus’s heedlessness results in an unfortunate incident in the school gym that lands him in the hospital, but it also marks a melting of the ice between him and Paul. As Paul softens, Giamatti doesn’t change his personality. Instead, his long held resentments just boil to the surface. We learn that Paul was a scholarship student, and while he has a chip on his shoulder, he also prizes the education he got at Barton and the home it has provided him when he was rejected elsewhere. That makes him furious at the children who don’t take the opportunity seriously, which yields the bad grades.
Payne always had Giamatti in mind for the role of Paul, even before the script by David Hemingson was written—hence the character’s name. And Giamatti is uniquely equipped for the part. As the son of onetime Yale University president A. Bartlett Giamatti, he grew up around both academia and East Coast snobbery. It’s clear he knows the rules of this world, and all its injustices, intimately, even if he had the kind of privilege that might make the fictional Paul turn up his nose.
At the same time, it feels like Payne, going back to the days of Sideways, has always understood how there’s a heart underneath the bitterness that Giamatti is so good at projecting. His character in that movie is another intelligent yet unaccomplished man, who numbs his pain with booze as well as the knowledge that he’s smarter than everyone around him.
The easy thing to do is to cast Giamatti as a sneering villain, and he can do that very well. Call it the Big Fat Liar conundrum: Not a good movie, but it sure is fun to see Giamatti blue and screaming, just like it’s extremely enjoyable to watch Giamatti channel his dogged verve into a character with real power, like prosecutor Chuck Rhoades on Billions. But The Holdovers reminds us that Giamatti is best when he’s getting to the root of sad sacks— people who feel life has essentially let them down. You can pity these guys, but they don’t want your pity. They want your respect.
