Small Giamatti

I tend to say a lot of hyperbolic stuff about movies, and I'll often contradict myself while picking favourites. If you ask me to name my favourite actor, I’ll give you a different answer every day of the week. If you narrow the focus slightly though, that will not be the case. Ask me the best Hollywood actor working today, and I’ll always say the same thing.

Like many of the great screen actors, Paul Giamatti is a master at calibrating himself to a movie’s tone. He can do quiet and naturalistic (Private Life), big and broad (Jungle Cruise), and walk the line between the two with that elusive quality called “movie star.” (The Holdovers).

Sometimes, Giamatti decides that a broad movie needs a grounded performance (Big Momma’s House). Or he’ll decide to go big in a realistic drama (Straight Outta Compton). What unites these choices is that they are always the right one.

It takes a good actor to deliver great material. What makes Giamatti special is that he’s consistently able to elevate bad material. Even if you’re watching complete slop like Shoot ‘em Up or Planet of the Apes (2001), you can count on Giamatti to do something compelling. Roger Ebert once wrote:

“No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.”

I feel the exact same way about Giamatti. Any movie he’s in is worth seeing, because he’s in it.

So if a Giamatti lead performance is a three course meal, a one-scene Giamatti performance is a perfect little treat. Even after Sideways made him an unlikely leading man, Giamatti continued to take small parts (his cheerful slave salesman in 12 Years a Slave is haunting), but the rarest Giamatti flavour is his pre-fame work.

With these roles, the films themselves have no reason to give Giamatti prominence. He’s an unfamous man playing a minor role. Giamatti always serves the movie first, never pulling too much focus, but you can always detect his power. Any pre-millennium Giamatti performance is a masterclass in making an impact without making a splash.

So with respect to Donnie Brasco, The Negotiator, and Saving Private Ryan, I want to pay tribute to my two favourite Giamatti performances of this period. Specifically, what he can do in a single scene. 

I present: Small Giamatti.

My Best Friend’s Wedding

What sets My Best Friend’s Wedding apart from a lot of it's contemporaries is that it’s actually quite mean. Julianne (Julia Roberts) has spent much of the movie torturing her best friend’s new fiancé, just because she has feelings for him. When this blows up in Julianne’s face, she’s faced with a moment of somber self-reflection. 

She sits in the hallway of her hotel, shakily smoking a cigarette. A bellman approaches.

Giamatti is on screen for less than ninety seconds. His character is credited only as “Bellman,” though his nametag says “Richard”. Richard sees a distraught Julianne and asks her if she’s been locked out of her room. She responds that she’s in a non-smoking room (it’s the 90s).

Richard can see that she’s in distress, and gently reminds her that she can’t smoke in the hallway either, suggesting she goes to the lobby. In a classically self-centered fashion, Julianne says: 

“Why don’t you have me arrested? … I’m a dangerous, criminal person, I do bad things to honest people.”

The way Giamatti plays this next moment is extraordinary. He kneels down and asks, with the exact cautious tone that you would speak to a distressed stranger, if he can help.

When Julianne doesn't respond, he drops his final line:

“You know, my grandmother always said: “this too shall pass.”

Giamatti says this with the weight of a life lived. Employing just a slight tremble in his voice, you instantly know that his grandmother is dead. You can imagine him repeating her words to himself in times of strife, and you can sense that he's reliving those times of strife right now. He, like all of us, has been the one smoking in the hallway. This is the thought that helped him get through it. 

Then, with a quiet wave, Richard pushes his cart down the hallway, and out of the film.

This scene should be supremely corny. Maybe it sounds that way from my description. It's is a genre-standard moment where a magical working class character gives some trite words of wisdom to the protagonist. Yet in the hands of Giamatti (and Roberts, and director PJ Hogan), it’s understated and textured. Two people sharing a small moment of humanity before moving on with their lives. 

It’s one minute and twenty eight seconds long, and it’s the first thing I think of when someone says My Best Friend’s Wedding. 

The Truman Show

In contrast to My Best Friend’s Wedding, Paul Giamatti is onscreen for a solid chunk of The Truman Show. 

Spoilers for a very good movie to follow:

Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank has spent the first half of the film with suspicions that his life takes place in a television studio. Around 70 minutes in, we’re finally given a view of the man behind the curtain: a pretentious director named Christof (Ed Harris), who views Truman as a living art piece, his “creation.” Christof operates out of a control room high above the set (there’s some subtle symbolism here), with a crew of technicians. One of them is Simeon, played by Paul Giamatti.

Simeon has a handful of lines throughout the second half, but I’d like to focus on a single moment that’s stuck with me since I first saw the movie twenty years ago.  

Again, spoilers, but the movie’s climax finds Truman trying to escape by riding a sailboat to the edge of the set. At this point, the movie has very effectively ratcheted up the tension. Christof has tried everything to stop Truman, including implanting him with a traumatizing fear of water. Truman has conquered this, willing to die for the truth. As Truman gets closer to the set’s walls, Christof locks eyes with Simeon. With a solemn nod, Simeon orders his crew to create an artificial storm.

The storm is violent and brutal, but this doesn’t deter Truman. He ties himself to his boat and screams to the heavens:

“You’re gonna have to kill me!”

Truman’s desperation is finally getting to the occupants of the control room. A TV executive urges Christof to end the storm and cut the feed. Another crew member begs him to stop. Instead, Christof orders Simeon to increase the winds of the storm and capsize the boat. Simeon refuses, and Giamatti delivers the best line reading in the movie:

“He’s gonna drown and he doesn’t even care.”

Up to this point, Simeon has been a proud, even gleeful accomplice to Christof’s manipulation. In this moment, you see that all come apart. He can’t bring himself to kill Truman. It’s a good line, the culmination of a miniature arc by a minor character. But it’s the way Giamatti says it - eyes welling up, voice breaking slightly - that’s unforgettable. He’s playing something many of us experience: feeling frozen when an authority figure tells us to do something wrong.

Simeon cares about his job, and is clearly frightened of Christof. Yet his basic humanity has finally come into conflict with that.

To be clear, Simeon is still a moral coward. Christof walks over to his computer and increases the winds himself, and Simeon doesn’t turn them off until he’s ordered to. But you can tell it’s taken everything he had to stage that one moment of quiet rebellion.

Again, a lot of this is the writing, but I can’t oversell how real Giamatti makes this feel. With one delivery, he brings the climax up to another level of emotionality and tension.

It’s a moment of supreme bravery and monumental cowardice, and Giamatti plays that contradiction so beautifully that I’ve never forgotten it.

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My Giamatti Canon

For any interested scholars, here are the major works:

-American Splendor (2003)

-Sideways (2004)

-Win Win (2011)

-Private Life (2019)

-The Holdovers (2023)