114 min | R | October 28, 2022 | Focus Features
A Jewish kid in 1980 Queens befriends a Black classmate and learns what his family already knows about how America sorts people. His grandfather tells him to do the right thing. The rest of his world teaches him the opposite.
Paul Graff is a sixth grader in Queens in 1980 who would rather draw than do his homework. He meets Johnny Davis, a Black classmate held back a grade, and the two boys cut class and dream of an escape neither can afford. The film tracks a single school year as Paul moves from public school to a private academy and watches the safety net pull tight around him and away from his friend. James Gray builds the story from his own childhood. The real subject is the moment a white family teaches a boy that his suffering matters and his friend’s does not.
Banks Repeta plays Paul as a kid who is selfish and tender in the same breath. He sells the small cruelties of childhood without softening them. Anthony Hopkins plays the grandfather Aaron Rabinowitz with a warmth that never curdles into sainthood. He delivers a lesson about standing up for the Davis boys of the world, and Hopkins lets you see the man failing to live it himself. Anne Hathaway plays Esther Graff as a mother who runs the PTA and folds the instant power enters the room. Jeremy Strong plays Irving Graff as a father whose violence and love come from the same exhausted place.
James Gray writes and directs with the restraint of a man who knows the ending and refuses to flinch. He shoots the film in muted browns and grays with cinematographer Darius Khondji, and the light inside the Graff house always looks like late afternoon. The period detail stays in the corners. A Reagan poster, a Sugarhill Gang record, a television playing the news. Gray stages the family dinners in long takes that let the arguments build and collapse without cutting away from the damage.
The film works best as a record of complicity rather than a drama of redemption. Paul does not rise to the moment. He takes the deal his family offers and learns to look away, and Gray refuses to let him off the hook or punish him for it. The race material stays earnest and never fully resolves, and the Davis boy exists more as Paul’s lesson than as his own person. What lands is the precision of the betrayal. This is a film about the exact age at which a child learns which side of the line he was born on.