The term “average Joe” is not generally associated with the term “film star,” but by transforming the most
average of characters into persons of depth and sincerity, Paul Giamatti has arguably made the association a
reality.
“Let’s be honest about this. I’m limited by my looks so I’m a tough sell,” Giamatti said in an interview with
The Independent back in 2007. “But there’s plenty of folk out there who look just like me, and
someone has to play them.” Play them he has, and well at that.
Regardless of his at times self-deprecating attitude — he’s stated that he has “never considered [himself] to
be an interesting person” and is equipped with “the mentality of a supporting actor” — there is no denying
that the 43-year-old actor has come to be recognized as a talented star in his own right.
In speaking about Giamatti’s performance in the 2004 film Sideways, director Alexander Payne told
Time magazine in 2005, “It’s my hope that we’re getting into an era where the value of a film is
based on its proximity to real life rather than its distance from it,” and continued, “To do that, you need
actors — stars, basically — who don’t necessarily look like Ben Affleck… Sideways proved [Giamatti]
can carry a movie. He is absolutely a star.” A star no doubt, but not one in the typical Hollywood sense.
The youngest of three children, Paul Edward Valentine Giamatti was born in New Haven, Conn., into an affluent
and high-achieving family. Giamatti’s father, Bartlett, who passed away in 1989, was a Renaissance literature
professor at Yale University and authored six books before becoming the university’s youngest president,
later becoming commissioner of Major League Baseball. Giamatti’s mother, Toni Smith, was an actress before
marrying Bartlett, after which she became a schoolteacher. She passed away around the time Sideways
was released.
Following his father’s academic pursuits, Giamatti earned an English degree from Yale and continued on to
earn a master’s degree in fine arts with a major in drama from the Yale University School of Drama. Before
moving to the big screen and in between working as a dishwasher and selling juice machines in Seattle,
Giamatti spent several years taking on various theatre roles, and in the mid-‘90s played roles in Tom
Stoppard’s Arcadia, David Hare’s Racing Demon, Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters and
Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh.
Then in 2003, Giamatti was given the role of the raging misanthrope comic-book author Harvey Pekar in
American Splendor. It was 2004 when Giamatti was offered his breakout role of playing the depressed
and defeated alcoholic writer Miles Raymond in Sideways, which garnered him a Golden Globe
nomination and put him on the map for directors and producers in the industry.
In addition to numerous supporting roles in films ranging from Private Parts (1997) to The
Illusionist (2006) and Cinderella Man (2005), Giamatti played the title role in the seven-part
HBO mini-series John Adams. It was a character that, much like many of his previous supporting
roles, is tormented and even described as “a wreck of a man.” One would think such dire character traits
would discourage an actor from taking on such roles, but for Giamatti it did the complete opposite.
“Do I walk through life feeling that way? Maybe, to some extent. This may be evading the question, but I’m
definitely interested in that state of being, in people feeling that kind of discomfort,” Giamatti
said in a 2009 interview with The Guardian. “I said to HBO, for eight and a half hours, people are
going to have to watch this guy be uncomfortable. But that’s really kind of great, the fact it’ll be
unpleasant for people to watch. I suppose there must be some way in which I’m compelled to show some side of
myself — or of people — that’s paranoid and fraught and beleaguered and downtrodden, just as Tom Cruise wants
to show that he’s terrifyingly upbeat and terrifyingly heroic all the time.”
His desire to play a less favourable role served him well, as his portrayal of the second U.S. president
earned him an Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actor in a miniseries or movie in 2008.
Not considered your typical “Hollywood hunk”, Giamatti doesn’t mind playing more of the “average Joe” roles.
In fact, he actually seems to prefer it.
“I’m clearly not Brad Pitt, and I’m never going to be Brad Pitt,” said Giamatti. “But I don’t think I’d want
to be Brad Pitt, you know? So that’s okay.”
Regularly cast in “character” roles — even referred to by Time magazine as “The World’s Best
Character Actor” in 2005 — Giamatti has often played characters who express a particular discomfort with
life, and turn to hostility as the method to express their feelings of contempt and defeatism. It’s been
suggested that perhaps since Giamatti tends to share some of these characters’ awkwardness, people often view
the actor and his role as synonymous — but that wouldn’t be a fair or accurate representation of the man
behind the character. Playing a brooding, defeated and resentful actor named Paul Giamatti in 2009’s Cold
Souls didn’t help the common tendency to compare, but it is arguable that some redemption has been made
with his role in this past year’s Barney’s Version, where he plays the lead role of Barney
Panofsky.
When Paul Met Barney
Barney’s Version is based on Canadian rebel author Mordecai Richler’s prize-winning — and
final — novel of the same name. First published in 1997 and over 400 pages in length, the novel was written
by Richler as he was approaching his 70th birthday and “feeling imitations of mortality,” as
described in the press release, much like his character Barney Panofsky, the two being close to mirror images
of each other.
The film borrows from the novel to tell the story of Barney Panofsky, “a seemingly ordinary man who lives an
extraordinary life.” This candid confessional spans four decades and two continents, and explores the
beginning and end of three marriages to vastly different women (Rachelle Lefevre, Minnie Driver and Rosamund
Pike), as well as the company of an outrageous yet endearing father (Dustin Hoffman) and a charming yet
debauched best friend (Scott Speedman). Adapted by Michael Konyves, directed by Richard J. Lewis and produced
by Robert Lantos, the film takes viewers on a journey through Barney’s tumultuous life, including the many
highs and the overabundance of lows, with Barney as the sole navigator and unlikely hero.
With the looming threat of a tell-all book revealing the more “compromising chapters of Barney’s past,”
including the mysterious and unsolved disappearance of Barney’s best friend Boogie, for which Barney remains
the prime suspect, Barney is compelled to reveal his own story, or rather, his own version of his story.
Not trying to hide or sugarcoat the many questionable experiences and events of his turbulent life and deeply
flawed character, Barney openly owns up to “every one of his flaws and failings with a self-lacerating wit,”
seemingly encouraging his audience to loathe his very being. However, due to his acute self-awareness, depth
and rawness, Barney ironically starts to become quite endearing to the viewer, and shockingly enough, even
loved.
As the character Barney was largely drawn from Richler himself, created in his image —Richler also having met
the love of his life at his wedding to his previous wife — it proved to be a difficult task to find an actor
that could accurately portray the Canadian literary hero and supposed “uncompromising satirist.” But after
watching the film Sideways, producer Robert Lantos instantly knew that Giamatti was the perfect
fit.
“He’s got this wonderful combination of curmudgeonly look and personality, kind of like a prickly pear
personality, much like Mordecai himself, under which beats a terrifically human heart, and you can feel his
heart beat even when he’s being prickly. And Barney is that character,” Lantos explains in an interview with
Lifestyle.
This unconventional combination was the route Lantos decided to take in his search for the perfect Barney.
“That combination is very rare; there is not a single Hollywood star that looks like a matinee idol that
could pull that off, or remotely come close to it,” Lantos continues. “[Giamatti] is fully rounded, in every
way. And Barney in my opinion couldn’t be conventionally handsome or it would have diluted the story and made
it less interesting, because then it would be obvious why these beautiful women go for him... So my view was,
we have to cast it — before I even thought of Paul — unconventionally; who’s got the goods, who’s got the
range, who’s got the prickly pear exterior, and who doesn’t seduce with his looks.”
As fitting as Giamatti was to play Barney, such a role did not come without its anxieties for the actor.
Fitting the physical requirements for the role of Barney was the easy part. It was navigating the actual
character and his intricate and complicated persona — all while protecting a legacy and doing a national icon
justice — that was a whole different story.
“I think I felt more pressure doing this than pretty much anything else I’ve ever done because of the iconic
nature of him,” Giamatti said to The Canadian Press of Richler in 2010. But Giamatti’s concerns were all for
naught, as his performance has garnered the actor much praise for tactfully embodying such a “cantankerous
protagonist” and even managing to inject Barney with some “romantic charm,” which earned him a win for Best
Actor — Motion Picture Musical or Comedy at this year’s Golden Globe Awards.
Not wanting to be overwhelmed by details of Richler’s life while preparing for his role, Giamatti put
Richler’s biography, videos, photos and even the novel aside to remain focused on the script alone. As he
explained in his interview with The Canadian Press, “At a certain point, I know that the novel of
Barney’s Version is research in some way, [but as with] historical research, I have to put it aside
at some point because there’s actors who are much smarter than me who can take all that information and use
it but it’s too much for me. I’m kind of too impressionable. I won’t be able to get something out of my head
and it’ll get in my way.”
This question of what to do with the novel, or rather how to use the novel was also encountered by
producer Lantos, but in a different way than Giamatti. Lantos had to determine how to transpose a novel of
such depth, detail and length onto the big screen, a task that took him a lengthy 12 years to complete, and a
process that he adoringly calls his “headache.”
From Page To Screen
By the point in the novel where Lantos learned of Barney Panofsky’s production company, Totally
Unnecessary Productions, he had already decided “to turn Barney Panofsky’s fiercely irreverent, surprisingly
romantic and always moving story into a movie,” the producer wrote in a feature published in The Toronto
Star in December 2010.
“It made me howl out loud in laughter, it made my eyes tear up later on… The full range of human emotions was
covered by this story, and so that was a good beginning,” Lantos elaborates in his interview with
Lifestyle.
In addition to the emotional response the novel elicited in Lantos, he also held the story close to his own
heart, as it deals in a world he knows well, with “material and stories and characters quite close to my own
life,” which further compelled the producer to bring the story to the big screen.
Most of all, it was one realization in particular that Lantos came to when first opening the book that served
as the eureka moment for his cinematic endeavour.
“I was a few pages into it [when] I came to the conclusion that I was reading a magnificent writer’s greatest
book. I didn’t know at the time it would be his last book, but it was his best book,” Lantos recalls.
Lantos had idolized the author ever since reading The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz while
attending high school in Montreal. The two men would later become good friends, meeting in 1980 after the
publication of Joshua Then and Now and working together on the film adaptation. As such, Lantos was
no stranger to the process of transferring a novel to film. However, what was different with Barney’s
Version was just how long it would take for the process to be completed.
Richler started writing the film’s screenplay back in 1999, but after a year of progress became ill and as a
result, stopped writing. After Richler’s passing in 2001, Lantos was left to develop the screenplay without
the author, and stood “determined to honour his legacy by making a movie that was worthy of the book,” as he
wrote in The Toronto Star.
Completing the script without Richler started to prove more difficult than anticipated, Lantos revealed:
“Writers came and went, including an Oscar winner, but none could nail Mordecai’s very specific and
inimitable voice. In the absence of its author, creating cinematic language for this sprawling novel turned
out to be the biggest challenge of my producing career.”
Faced with the challenge and uncertainty, there was one thing Lantos was resolute in remaining focused on:
Honouring the book.
“The one thing I was determined to do is to honour the book, and to try at least to come close to its
integrity and to its artistic quality,” explains Lantos in his interview with Lifestyle. “How to
best accomplish that? We tried various ways. In the case with this novel — it’s not the case with every
novel, but this sprawling, convoluted novel that has many, many subplots, and there’s no way to actually keep
all that and narrow it down to two hours — if we kept everything that Mordecai had in the novel, and every
character and every subplot, it would be a 10-hour, 12-hour movie.
“So choices had to be made, what do you keep, and what do you not. And that took a long time because I love
all of it, and I wanted to keep at least a little bit of everything, and keeping a little bit of everything
actually doesn’t work... it becomes totally fragmented,” Lantos continues. “The best way to honour the book
is by simply finding the heart, and keeping only that, and then using everything else only to the extent to
which it enhances the heart and let go of the other organs” — the “heart” being the relationships between
Barney and the love of his life and third wife, Miriam, and between Barney and his father, the other love of
his life.
In 2007, Whale Music director Richard J. Lewis joined Lantos and surreptitiously spent several
months writing a script, which proved to Lantos the director’s commitment. Once Lantos and Lewis met with
screenwriter Michael Konyves and read his screenplay, Lantos could almost hear Richler approvingly say, “Now
we are cooking.”
In describing what Lantos learned the most from his second experience bringing a Richler novel to the screen,
the producer says it’s really quite simple. “You have to be willing to reinvent the book from scratch in
sincere language,” explains Lantos. “That was the lesson. I had that lesson before, but this time it was
definitive.”
Above all, aside from his deep affection for Richler and the novel, Lantos felt there was an even deeper
reason for why such a film needed to be created.
“It’s the kind of film that isn’t made anymore because it doesn’t deal in black and white, it doesn’t deal in
absolutes, there are no white knights, and there are no devils. It reflects the way life is — shades of
grey,” Lantos says. “Movies like this were made often in the ’70s, but they’re not today. Today, we’re living
in a cinema world of absolutes; it’s good or bad. If you’re a hero, you gotta be a hero all the time. And
this is not that kind of movie, and that’s where Paul Giamatti comes in... Mordecai gave us the ingredients
but Paul infused them with flesh and blood.”
Unlike the tendency for films today to stick to superficial subject matter, Barney’s Version dug up
the grit, or rather the essence, of life as many of us know it, which most contemporary films tend to
romanticize or exclude altogether.
“It’s a film that tells the story of a man’s life, a man who was so far from perfect, just as far as most
people are, and we show his ups and downs, his flaws, his missteps, and the challenges for the filmmaker — my
challenge was and what Mordecai gave to me — is to show this character who does all kinds of things you’re
not supposed to do, and he’s often obnoxious, and yet do it in such a way that you love him because of his
humanity.”
Perhaps then, in addition to portraying the often ignored and commonly misunderstood ordinary folk,
Barney’s Version simultaneously reminds us of our own humanity, and rightfully so, as such is more
or less forgotten today where cold superficiality seems to reign supreme.
With upcoming films in the works including Bubba Nosferatu: Curse of the She-Vampires, in which he
will play Colonel Tom Parker, and The Owl in Daylight, which he reportedly will both produce and
star in as author Philip K. Dick, Giamatti has his hands quite full, something that the self-professed
workaholic enjoys. “When I’m not working, I go crazy trying to figure out what... I’m going to do next,”
Giamatti said in an interview with The Independent. “I used to do yoga classes but now I get so
paralyzed because I want to work again and then I get sort of lost, so then I feel I can’t waste my time
doing yoga when I should be reading scripts.”
Giamatti’s constant worrying about getting work isn’t such a bad thing if it means the public becoming privy
to more of his (extra)ordinary roles. Although many of his characters are dire, disagreeable and downright
disasters, Giamatti has proven his talent for making such characters not only lovable, but relatable, evoking
from his viewers the often forgotten desire to empathize and forgive. What this actor has created through the
vessel that is each character is arguably a deeper, more substantial understanding of life and its
inhabitants, an intimate connection — something more than surface-value interactions.
In a recent interview with Venice Magazine, Giamatti explains, “One of the reasons I started acting
was it’s a wonderful way to connect, not only with the audience but with other people. It’s still something
where you can feel, in a way, no deeper connection than with somebody you’re acting with. It can be very
strange, but it can be a really intense, visceral connection with somebody that’s pretty unique.”
It’s ironic, then, that someone who at first glance appears to be quite average is so adept at creating the
very opposite — characters with an unusually invigorating depth, as witnessed by his portrayal of Barney
Panofsky. And as Giamatti himself says, in referring to the art that is acting, the whole process itself is
truly “an incredibly intimate thing. It’s wonderful.” And there’s nothing at all ordinary about that.
SIDEBAR:
Select Filmography
Sabrina (1995)
Mighty Aphrodite (1995)
Private Parts (1997)
Deconstructing Harry (1997)
Doctor Dolittle (1998)
The Truman Show (1998)
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
The Negotiator (1998)
Man on the Moon (1999)
Big Mama’s House (2000)
Planet of the Apes (2001)
Storytelling (2001)
Big Fat Liar (2002)
American Splendor (2003)
Sideways (2004)
Cinderella Man (2005)
The Hawk Is Dying (2006)
The Illusionist (2006)
Fred Claus (2007)
Cold Souls (2009)
The Last Station (2009)
Barney’s Version (2010)
