Focus Features on Monday unveiled the first trailer for The Holdovers, a dramedy marking the first reteam of Paul Giamatti with filmmaker Alexander Payne since the 2004 Oscar winner Sideways. Also starring newcomer Dominic Sessa and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, the film is set to hit theaters in New York and Los Angeles on October 27, expanding to further states on November 3rd before going nationwide on November 10th.
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The Holdovers is the eighth feature from two-time Oscar winner Payne, who, in addition to the wine-tasting drama Sideways, is known for Citizen Ruth, Election, About Schmidt, The Descendants, Nebraska and Downsizing. The ’70s-set film written by Whiskey Cavalier creator David Hemingson takes as its focus Paul Hunham (Giamatti), a curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school who is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually he forms an unlikely bond with one of them — the damaged, brainy troublemaker Angus (Sessa) — and with the school’s head cook (Randolph), who has just lost a son in Vietnam.
“Do you think I want to be babysitting you?” Paul asks Angus in the trailer, which is quick to set up hostilities between the two. “No, I was praying your mother would pick up the phone or your father would arrive in a helicopter or a flying saucer.”
“My father’s dead,” Angus responds.
As Paul’s awareness of what’s going on inside the troubled youth grows, it’s Randolph’s head cook Mary who becomes the teacher’s conscience, imploring him to deal with the teenager with more compassion and tact. “You don’t tell a boy that’s been left behind at Christmas that nobody wants him,” she says. “What’s wrong with you?”
When Paul catches up with Angus later on, he looks to connect with the boy he’d previously looked at as a lost cause. “I find the world a bitter and complicated place, and it seems to feel the same way about me,” he says. “I think you and I have this in common.”
The Holdovers sold to Focus out of last year’s Toronto Film Festival for around $30M, which repped a record for the festival. Mark Johnson, Bill Block and Hemingson produced the film, with Andrew Golov, Thom Zadra and Chris Stinson serving as exec producers. Carrie Preston, Tate Donovan and Gillian Vigman are among those rounding out the cast.
Other titles to come this fall from Focus, which most recently released Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City and the Julie Cohen doc Every Body on the lives of intersex people, include My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 (September 8) and Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls (September 22). View the trailer for The Holdovers by clicking above.