Alexander Payne is to reunite with his Sideways drinking buddy Paul Giamatti for his latest slice of melancholic comedy The Holdovers.
Deadline reports that the director of Nebraska and The Descendants will reteam with Giamatti for the first time since their Oscar-winning breakout in 2004.
The synopsis for The Holdovers finds Giamatti playing a universally disliked teacher at the prep school Deerfield Academy. His non-fans include his students, fellow faculty and headmaster who all find his pomposity and rigidity exasperating. With no family and nowhere to go over Christmas holiday in 1970, Paul remains at school to supervise students unable to journey home. After a few days, only one student holdover remains — a trouble-making 15-year-old named Angus, a good student undermined by bad behavior that always threatens to get him expelled. Joining Paul and Angus is Deerfield’s head cook Mary—an African American woman who caters to sons of privilege and whose own son was recently lost in Vietnam. These three very different shipwrecked people form an unlikely Christmas family, sharing comic misadventures during two very snowy weeks in New England, and realizing that none of them are beholden to their past.
Payne, who got the idea for the The Holdovers after watching a 1930s French film said that “Ever since I worked with Paul in Sideways, I’ve wanted to work with him again, and this role is tailor made for him.”
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Originally published June 15, 2021. Updated June 14, 2021.
