Describing Alexander Payne as underrated clearly exaggerates the case: After all, among his many laurels, he’s shared a pair of Oscars for Best Screenplay and earned three nominations as a director.
Mary Lamb , Paul Hunham and Angus Tully are the lone residents of a prep school over Christmas break.
But Payne never quite receives the fannish adulation showered on such filmmaking contemporaries as Paul Thomas Anderson, David Fincher, Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson.
In a minor Christmas miracle, after several days of Hunham’s bah-humbuggery, Santa seems to deliver everyone an early gift when one student’s wealthy father unexpectedly helicopters in and offers to whisk the lot of them to a ski resort. However, the mother and stepfather of Hunham’s charge Angus Tully — vacationing on a delayed honeymoon — can’t be reached to grant permission, and he watches with forlorn resentment as his fellow prisoners ascend to the sky and escape to the slopes.
The enforced intimacy of their confinement eventually produces — with Mary’s occasional prodding — a tentative rapprochement between antagonistic student and teacher. Both remain prickly and guarded, but Paul and Angus develop a grudging mutual respect as shared characteristics keep revealing themselves.incrementally ventures into the larger world after a first half spent largely within Barton’s confining walls.
Da’Vine Joy Randolph is less of a known quantity — I was primarily familiar with her sterling comedic work in— but perhaps even more impressive as the bereaved Mary. Reserved but formidable, with a sardonic wit, Mary keeps her grief carefully dammed until a combination of too many drinks and a recording of Artie Shaw’s “When Winter Comes” opens the floodgates.
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