Like tragic little rich boy Tully (Dominic Sessa), Alexander Payne traps us in a weirdly quaint version of 1970s white America with little contemporary insight.

This isn’t your typical Hollywood feel-good Christmas movie. We are in a New England boys’ prep school in 1969 on the last day before the Christmas break. These are mainly boys from wealthy backgrounds, about to head off to an island or a ski slope for the holidays. The all-male teaching staff wear tweed and smoke pipes and the least favourite of them – with students and staff – is ancient history teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti). He draws the short straw and has to supervise the small handful of boys forced to stay at the school over the break.

Through a not at all believable plot twist, all the boys but one, the aforementioned Angus Tully, are whisked away for a more fun time, setting the scene for some learning for our two flawed white guys. They are not alone in the cold, draughty halls – cook Mary (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) is grieving the loss of her son Curtis in the Vietnam War, who was a recent graduate of the school, and is reluctant to spend the holidays with her pregnant sister as she drinks her way through her sorrows.

That the film has an 8.0 rating on IMDb says something for the popularity of its nostalgic, conservative charm. Payne has filmed it as if it was actually made in 1970, copying the look and feel of film in post production, mimicking the typology and structure of the opening and closing credits and using sudden camera zooms and languorous edits reminiscent of films like The Graduate (1967). I’m scratching my head to think what purpose it serves, other than to show off his nerdy film school knowledge of 50 year old film styles. If he had contrasted it with a 2023 social understanding, perhaps it may have felt profound rather than cumbersome, but we seem narratively as well as stylistically mired in the 70s.

The heart of the story is Hunham, a former scholarship student of the school turned bitter curmudgeon due to his ill treatment by the entitled wealthy. That he at first resents and then comes to understand Tully is no surprise and the final scenes are genuinely touching. But on the side lines is someone much more worthy of a story – Mary. It is 1970, a few short years after the civil rights protests and the abolition of racial segregation and she is a woman of colour whose son joined the military as he couldn’t afford college. She sits on the margins of the story, stealing some scenes – the Christmas party where she is allowed some emotional space – but really just a narrative device to illustrate the ‘awful’ prospects for Tully if he fails.

As good as the three leads are, it’s like wandering into a late night movie rerun on TV. You can come in at any point and know exactly what it’s about, stay until the end and feel reassured that the world is hard but there are people in authority who are basically good. That Tully is possibly saved from the fate of Curtis doesn’t seem, in 2023, something worth making a movie about.