Paul Giamatti, Best Actor. When his career first started, the actor seemed destined for a career as a first-rate supporting actor; the kind who routinely steals movies out from under more classically handsome leading men and leaves you wishing the industry were such that he could be a star himself.
Perhaps this is that industry. After his breakout role as Kenny “Pig Vomit” Rushton in 1997’s Private Parts, Giamatti worked steadily in The Truman Show, Saving Private Ryan, The Negotiator, Safe Men, and Man on the Moon. It wasn’t until 2003 that he found a lead role to suit his talents in American Splendor, and then again the following year in Sideways. The parts were similar: intelligent curmudgeons who lack people skills. They could easily have been rendered unsympathetic in the hands of a different actor, but Giamatti’s inherent likeability drags them to a middle ground where we root for them to succeed and fail at once. Through his interpretation, the characters become so complex that we shrug off our need for heroes or villains and simply accept them as they are. It’s an incredible balancing act, although it helps that he is constantly making us laugh.
Still, it would have been easy for Giamatti to view American Splendor and Sideways as a high-water mark in his career as a leading man, and simply become the most demanded character actor this side of Philip Seymour Hoffman. But here he is as a first-time Best Actor nominee for his nuanced work in The Holdovers. How did he get here? By following two tracks concurrently: as a supporting actor in studio films and a lead actor in independent fare. While earning his paycheck with lesser roles in films like Cinderella Man, The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and San Andreas, he kept himself in the leading man conversation, which is paying off now. It also paid off in real time with fascinating performances that demonstrated Giamatti’s rare and indefatigable charisma, and his penchant for choosing roles that challenge it.
If you have a character who is tough to root for, give him to Giamatti, and he’ll make a meal out of it. That’s what he did in Barney’s Version, an adaptation of Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler’s fictional autobiography of a philandering TV producer who finds and loses love several times over, is accused of murdering his best friend, and eventually develops severe dementia. The film doesn’t quite come together but is best appreciated as a dramatic reimagining of a Judd Apatow comedy in which an overconfident schlub has sex with someone—or in this case, several someones—far hotter than he is. On the page, Barney is one of the most despicable characters Giamatti ever played; he drinks to excess, stalks women, cheats on his spouses, and bears no discernible charisma. He somehow gets characters played by Minnie Driver and Rosamund Pike to marry him. We should hate this guy. And yet Giamatti creates sympathy without ever begging for it. At every turn, he plays Barney like a man simply looking for the real thing, misguided as he may be.
He pulls off a similar trick in the vastly underseen Win Win, which writer-director Tom McCarthy made a few years before winning Best Picture for Spotlight. It’s a classic in-betweener, the place where Giamatti makes his living: too smart and adult to be a conventional hit, but also too subtle to be an Oscars contender. Giamatti plays Mike, a lawyer in small-town New Jersey who takes guardianship over a client with dementia just for the stipend, then sticks him in a nursing home because he doesn’t have time to properly care for him. He’s not as bad as he sounds. Mike needs the money to keep his floundering practice afloat, and the nursing home is a pretty good one. Things get more complicated when the man’s grandson arrives, and Mike takes him in, partially out of guilt and partially so the kid doesn’t sniff out his misdeed. The film precisely identifies the blurred lines between adolescence and adulthood, and Giamatti’s performance is crucial to its achievements. While not quite as despicable as the protagonist of Barney’s Version, Mike is the kind of complicated person we often meet in life but rarely see in film. He’s neither a good guy or a bad one. His choices frustrate us, and we’re not sure if he deserves redemption or punishment. The film essentially dares us to write him off, but Giamatti finds the right wavelength—quiet desperation—and rides it until we can only accept the character, warts and all.
Giamatti has also displayed a quality most movie stars can’t even claim: the ability to save mediocre movies from the brink of disaster. He did it in M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water, a film of big ideas and middling execution, which Giamatti holds together through sheer will, and All is Bright, where Giamatti goes against type as a taciturn ex-con selling Christmas trees in New York City. A similar thing happens in Cold Souls, a Kaufmanesque bit of literary sci-fi in which Giamatti plays himself. It’s a smart move; playing yourself, especially in a lead role, signals a level of fame worthy of leading man roles. Giamatti didn’t get the bump John Malkovich did from Being John Malkovich, perhaps because Cold Souls is dry, humorless, and not nearly as celebrated as the Spike Jonze-directed marvel. Nevertheless, Giamatti puts on a clinic, playing himself with his normal soul, with no soul, and, at one point, someone else’s soul. It’s a flex of his acting muscles in a role that reinforced his status as a leading man of stature.
The Holdovers fits right in with these other leading man roles, which is why it would be so fitting for him to win his long-overdue Oscar for it. Paul Hunham is an alcoholic prep school teacher with a talent for insults and little else. He is, in essence, Miles from Sideways, if he never knocked on Maya’s door and instead moved on to harder stuff. We’ve seen a lot of cruel prep school teachers over the years, but few of them come around like Hunham does, ultimately sacrificing his job to protect a kid who, days earlier, had been the bane of his existence. It’s a decision worthy of a leading man, not a supporting player, and the Giamatti twist is that we never end up seeing Hunham as a hero. He doesn’t reveal a heart of gold. He just manages to muster the courage to do the right thing for another person, once and maybe never again. We remain a little conflicted about him, even as he drives off into the sunset. It’s a Giamatti special, and he does it so often that he makes it look easy. That’s probably why he won’t win the Oscars — and why he should.