Alexander Payne reunites with Paul Giamatti, twenty years after Sideways, for a New England-set Christmas dramedy that feels like a long-lost Hal Ashby film. Giamatti’s Paul Hunham is a dyspeptic Classics teacher at a New England prep school. Stuck on campus over Christmas 1970 with a difficult student (Dominic Sessa) and the cafeteria manager (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) whose son just died in Vietnam.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph won the Oscar — deservedly. Her grief is the gravitational center of the film. Sessa, in his debut, is remarkable. Giamatti is, well, Giamatti — and that’s the point.
Payne shoots in muted ’70s film stock. The pacing is unhurried. Eventually it stops being a movie about a curmudgeon and becomes a movie about three lonely people trying to be kind to each other.
