Alexander Payne’s next film will reunite him with… | Little White Lies

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Alexan­der Payne’s next film will reunite him with Paul Giamatti

15 Jun 2021

Words by Charles Bramesco

Two men sitting at a table, each holding a wine glass, surrounded by shelves of books and wine bottles.
Two men sitting at a table, each holding a wine glass, surrounded by shelves of books and wine bottles.
The Holdovers puts the Side­ways star at an elite prep school over the hol­i­days cir­ca 1970.

Though his most recent film Down­siz­ing was a cost­ly flop that opened to mixed reviews, it would be fool­ish to ful­ly count Alexan­der Payne out. One of the great scions of 90s indie cin­e­ma, he’s always worth keep­ing an eye on, and the news of his next fea­ture project pro­vides a tidy reminder why.

Dead­line has the exclu­sive that Payne will soon begin work on The Holdovers, a dram­e­dy in the director’s char­ac­ter­is­tic mold that will reunite him with Paul Gia­mat­ti, his one-time star on the Oscar-favored wine-fueled road trip Side­ways. And by the sound of it, this new film will return the Payne/​Giamatti part­ner­ship to the casu­al­ly caus­tic yet fun­ny reg­is­ter of their ear­li­er work.

Gia­mat­ti plays the least-liked teacher at the elite New Eng­land prep school Deer­field Acad­e­my, where the stu­dents and staff alike find his pom­pos­i­ty and rigid­i­ty” alien­at­ing. He offers to stay on cam­pus over the hol­i­day break in 1970 and look after the youths with nowhere else to go, a lone­ly time dur­ing which he estab­lish­es a bond with two oth­er way­ward souls: a né’er-do-well teen named Angus, con­stant­ly on the brink of expul­sion, and the kitchen’s head cook Mary, a Black woman in a sea of white priv­i­lege nurs­ing the grief from her son’s recent death in Vietnam.

The unlike­ly group shares some com­ic mis­ad­ven­tures” dur­ing two snow-blan­ket­ed weeks, and ulti­mate­ly comes to real­ize that none of them is behold­en to their past,” as the Dead­line bul­letin has it. This seems to be in keep­ing with Payne’s recent the­mat­ic con­cerns; Down­siz­ing, at its core, was also a sto­ry about a mid­dle-aged man seiz­ing unex­pect­ed cir­cum­stances to trig­ger some per­son­al growth.

After the fas­ci­nat­ing mis­step of his pre­vi­ous film – which, cred­it where it’s due, gave us a danc­ing Udo Kier – Payne is return­ing to his wheel­house for his next out­ing, in ver­bose­ness and dis­con­tent­ment and neu­ro­sis. As Payne him­self says in the Dead­line item, I think it’s a mat­ter of time before [Paul Gia­mat­ti] gets his Oscar.”

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