133 min | R | October 27, 2023 | Focus Features
A bitter classics teacher gets stuck supervising the prep-school boys with nowhere to go over Christmas. One troubled kid and a grieving cook are all the company he gets. Turns out the company is the point.
Barton Academy empties for Christmas break in 1970. Paul Hunham teaches ancient history and despises nearly everyone who passes through his classroom. The school assigns him to babysit the boys who have nowhere to go for the holidays. One student remains, a sharp and wounded teenager named Angus Tully, and the cafeteria manager Mary Lamb stays on too, grieving a son killed in Vietnam. The film is about three people the world has discarded learning to tolerate and then need each other. It is a story about damage and the small mercies that make damage survivable.
Paul Giamatti plays Hunham as a man who has weaponized his own disappointment. He hides a wandering eye and a body that betrays him behind a wall of contempt, and Giamatti lets the cruelty slip just enough to show the hurt underneath. Dominic Sessa plays Angus with the volatility of a kid testing whether any adult will stay. He matches Giamatti line for line and never reads as a first-timer. Da’Vine Joy Randolph plays Mary with quiet, immovable grief. She carries the moral weight of the film without raising her voice, and her silences land harder than the script’s sharpest dialogue.
Alexander Payne directs from a script by David Hemingson and builds the whole thing to resemble a film made in 1971. The image carries visible grain and faded color, the studio logos are period-correct, and the cuts and slow zooms imitate the grammar of the era. This is not nostalgia for its own sake. The vintage texture lowers the audience’s guard and makes the sentiment feel earned rather than manufactured. Payne stages long scenes of two and three people talking in cold rooms and trusts the actors to fill them. The snowbound campus becomes a pressure cooker where nobody can hide from anybody.
Payne has built a career out of finding the dignity in unlikable men. Hunham belongs in that lineage, but the film gives him company the earlier loners never had. The ending refuses easy redemption and offers something better, a single act of decency that costs the man everything and changes nothing about who he is. The film earns its warmth because it never pretends the world rewards warmth. These three people will go back to their separate ruins. For one stretch of winter they are not alone, and the film knows that is the most anyone gets.