Here’s something the 4K transfer can’t give back: before NOBODY’S FOOL even starts, the VHS runs its own trailer reel first, a Paramount Home Video ad for its “Classic Romances” line, “Priced to Own,” scored to a needle-drop of “Take Your Breath Away” — the studio repurposing its own TOP GUN song to sell a shelf of unrelated tapes. Then, finally, the “Feature Presentation” card: gold letters, purple gradient, a fanfare doing a lot of emotional work for what is, functionally, a logo screen. None of that exists on the disc. The 4K version starts the movie exactly where the movie starts. What’s missing isn’t picture quality — the VHS looks worse, softer and dimmer — it’s the ceremony a studio used to build in front of its own product, the sense of an event about to happen instead of a file about to play. The tape dates itself before the movie even begins. The movie underneath it hardly does.
There was a time when Paul Newman was far more than those famous blue eyes staring back at you from a bottle of salad dressing or a stone-fired-crust frozen pizza. Yes, he raced cars in real life — not just in that Pixar movie. For younger readers who may know only the brand, Newman was first and foremost one of the great screen actors of his generation. What I remember most is that unmistakable grin in COOL HAND LUKE, equal parts mischief and defiance. Fast-forward fifteen years and he was already playing grizzled veterans. His first performance that truly felt like an old-man role came in THE VERDICT (1982), where he played a washed-up alcoholic lawyer clawing toward redemption. By the time NOBODY’S FOOL arrived in 1994, Newman looked every bit his nearly seventy years, but the goods were still very much there. The charisma hadn’t dimmed, and that famous smile could still light up the screen.
That wasn’t merely a nostalgic squint backward, either. Newman earned his eighth Best Actor nomination for Sully, losing to Tom Hanks in FORREST GUMP. What makes the nomination interesting is its timing. THE VERDICT had earned him a nomination in 1982, only for him to lose to Ben Kingsley in GANDHI. Then came THE COLOR OF MONEY in 1986, which finally won him the competitive Oscar the Academy had been withholding since COOL HAND LUKE — the sort of makeup prize an industry hands out once it has embarrassed itself for long enough. By 1994, Newman had nothing left to prove and no debt left for anyone to settle. The Academy nominated him again anyway. That wasn’t sentiment. That was a room full of voters looking at a nearly seventy-year-old man playing a construction worker with a bad knee and deciding the work stood on its own.
The construction worker with the bad knee has a name: Donald “Sully” Sullivan, and the first thing the movie tells you about him is how he talks to his landlady. Miss Beryl Peoples opens the film narrating a pattern to someone named Clive Sr.: a birdbath struck by lightning last week, a streetlight the year before, something working its way closer to her house every year. It takes a few lines to realize Clive Sr. is her late husband, not anyone in the room. “I have the feeling this is the year he lowers the boom,” she says, meaning God, meaning herself, not Sully at all. Sully’s response, once he arrives, is to ask if she’s still alive in there. She offers tea. He says no. She asks about his necktie, half worried it means police trouble again. He tells her not to worry unless she’s the one who turned in his parking tickets. Nobody in the scene is in crisis, and nobody is really talking about anything, which is the point: this is two people who have lived above and below each other long enough that mortality and porch railings get discussed in the same tone of voice.
That’s North Bath before the movie has told you a single thing about the plot. Russo built the town out of Ballston Spa, New York, permanently in the shadow of a fancier neighbor down the road, just as fictional North Bath sits in the shadow of fictional Schuyler Springs. Peter and the grandkids haven’t shown up yet. The porch has already told you everything you need to know.
Sully’s first words to his own son, three years since the last visit, are “you need a lift?” Peter has to say “Dad?” before Sully places him, and what comes back is practical, not warm — a ride offered the way you’d offer one to anyone who needed it. Peter, it turns out, has been teaching at the University of West Virginia. He’s arrived for Thanksgiving with his wife, Charlotte, and his two young sons, Will and Wacker. The tension between Peter and Charlotte is audible before anyone’s out of the car — someone calls it “the Thanksgiving from hell,” and someone else tells them to knock it off. Sully’s ex-wife, Vera, Peter’s mother, lives close enough that she’s factored into the weekend too, which makes this less a homecoming than a logistics problem with feelings folded in. It’s the same move Beryl gets on the porch: solve the practical problem, skip the feeling. This time it’s aimed at his own son.
The two boys meet Sully for the first time in the car, and it doesn’t go especially well. Wacker wants to know who he is. Charlotte tells him it’s his grandfather. “Does he always look like that?” Wacker asks, and Sully doesn’t defend himself: “Yeah, most of the time.” Sully asks, in turn, how the kid came by the nickname. Wacker answers by shouting it — “Wacker!” — and slamming a book into Sully’s bad knee, hard enough that Peter has to pull the car over. Sully reacts in the moment, real pain and no attempt to hide it, then lets it go. No lecture for the kid, no grudge carried into the rest of the scene. Will is a different matter: the boy who gets Sully’s attention from that point forward.
Will ends up in Sully’s care almost by accident. Peter has work to do in town, Sully offers to take the boy with him, and that’s it — the arrangement that will define the rest of the movie begins as a logistical fix. It’s Sully himself who worries about the site out loud — what if Will falls into a ditch, what if he steps on a nail — a caution he’s never once extended to himself. Peter laughs. Sully doesn’t let it go: “What’s so funny?” “Nothing.” It’s that non-answer that gets him there: “You mean, I worry about him, and I never worried about you?” Peter doesn’t deny it. “Well, you skipped a generation, didn’t you?” There’s no joke doing the work here, no deflection. Peter means it, and Sully doesn’t argue. The movie never resolves what that means — whether the tenderness Sully shows Will is something new that a second chance unlocked, or whether it was always there and Peter simply never received it. It lets the accusation sit unanswered while Sully takes the boy to work anyway.
The house Sully takes him to is his childhood home, the one Miss Beryl will later save by sending Wirf a check for the back taxes. Sully and Carl go inside to look it over and completely forget that Will is waiting alone in front of what must look to a child like an abandoned, faintly frightening house. When Sully finally remembers and comes back out, Will is scared and trying not to show it. Asked if Sully forgot him, his answer is “I didn’t mean to” — not an accusation, an apology, as if the failure were his own. Sully gives him an actual choice — come inside or go find his dad — and Will chooses his dad.
Peter’s response, when he hears what happened, is one of the harshest lines in the movie: “You’re never going to change, are you?” Sully doesn’t defend himself this time either. He finds Will alone and admits it plainly, without a joke: “Kind of messed up today, didn’t I? You were pretty scared, weren’t you?” Then he tells him what he used to do at Will’s age whenever he got scared: try to be brave for exactly one minute, then two. He hands Will his own watch to time it. It’s the same translation Sully always makes, turning a feeling into a task and then doing the task, except the task this time is teaching a frightened boy how to count out his own courage.
Rub finally says what has been bothering him: “There’s not enough work for the three of us.” Sully brushes past it, tells him not to worry, and when Rub says he doesn’t like it, Sully doesn’t soften: “You don’t have to like it.” It’s about as blunt as Sully gets with anyone in the movie, and it’s aimed at the one person who has never asked much of him beyond a job and a little attention. Rub quits on the spot. Sully chases him down anyway, up onto the sidewalk to keep pace, Peter along for the ride. “You ever seen anybody that stubborn?” Sully asks. “Yes, I have,” Peter says, and doesn’t say who he means.
Rub’s jealousy of Peter never gets explained beyond that apparent math problem: three workers, not enough hours, and Rub is the obvious one to remove. But the work probably isn’t what frightens him most. Peter has a claim on Sully that Rub can never earn, however long he carries the tools or follows him from job to job. What Rub sees shifting toward Peter is not merely employment but something resembling a father’s attention — the little bit of belonging Sully has given him, and perhaps the closest thing to it Rub has ever had.
Hoffman gets maybe four scenes as Officer Raymer, and he’s already refusing to play the role at the level the script would allow him to. Raymer’s whole character is trying to enforce something and failing: the same broken taillight, cited three separate times, threats to impound a truck that never get followed through, a “Sully, you’re on the sidewalk!” answered with an immediate “Up yours, Raymer.” It escalates all the way to an actual firearm — Raymer fires a warning shot at Sully, and gets punched in the face for it — and even that doesn’t buy him any dignity. Afterward, in Judge Flatt’s chambers, Raymer gets asked what he usually does when somebody throws a punch. “Duck,” he says. “Next time, do that,” the judge tells him. Nobody in North Bath takes him seriously, including the camera, including the judge.
What Hoffman brings to the part is real, specific frustration — not comic-relief incompetence, but the exhaustion of a man losing a battle he cannot win against people who decided years ago that he doesn’t matter. This is 1994, well before the Philip Seymour Hoffman most audiences came to know, and the thing that would define so much of his later work is already visible: the instinct for locating the bruised, lonely, very real person underneath a role that could have remained a punchline. Even in a part this small, he can’t help himself.
The smirk arrives half a beat before the line. The deflection comes dressed up as a joke. It’s Bruce Willis playing Carl Roebuck, and he wants you to know he’s smarter than the room he’s in. None of it reads as a tic at the time — that happens only in retrospect, after watching him run variations on the same play across dozens of later pictures. What complicates the read is what Willis gave up to appear here at all. He was commanding something like fifteen million dollars for action movies at the time. NOBODY’S FOOL paid him Screen Actors Guild scale, roughly fourteen hundred dollars a week, because he wanted to work opposite Newman badly enough to take the cut. He wasn’t coasting on the persona, though he couldn’t entirely escape it even while trying to do something smaller. Willis retired from acting in 2022 after an aphasia diagnosis that was later specified as frontotemporal dementia. A movie filled with bodies beginning to send their owners overdue bills plays differently with that knowledge sitting beside it.
Wirf delivers the news like a subpoena: “You own the house on Bowdin again. She paid the back taxes.” Sully’s first reaction isn’t gratitude. “I told you I didn’t want anything to do with that place.” Wirf doesn’t let him off the hook. This isn’t about what Sully wants, he says, and he doesn’t care what Sully wants. “This is about need.”
Clive Jr. has skipped town by this point, and Wirf spells out what that means for Beryl in a single line: she needs this gesture to matter, and she needs Sully to be grateful for it, whether or not he wants a dilapidated house loaded with memories he has spent his life avoiding. The movie never tells us what becomes of the place. We’ve already seen the inside, run-down enough to require far more than a few weekends of repair, and nothing in the remaining runtime suggests Sully has suddenly developed the follow-through to restore a house he never wanted back. Ownership isn’t the same thing as a plan.
Sully’s version of a Christmas present is a coin. “It occurs to me I forgot to give you your Christmas present. Call your wife. Telephone’s right there.” No wrapping, no sentiment — just a quarter and a nod toward the pay phone. It’s the same translation that has run through the whole movie: the ride instead of an embrace for Peter, the watch instead of comfort for Will. Except this time, the gift isn’t really an object at all. It’s an opportunity, disguised as an errand so neither man has to acknowledge what it means.
We never hear the call. What we get is the aftermath: Peter finds Sully and asks, “Could you and Rub spare me for a couple days?” The request doesn’t explain itself, and the movie refuses to fill in the blank. Something happened on that phone call — some opening, perhaps even the beginning of a reconciliation — and Sully’s fingerprint is all over it without his ever having to say a word about marriage, fatherhood, or any feeling he can’t disguise as practical advice.
Jessica Tandy died on September 11, 1994, at eighty-five, three months before NOBODY’S FOOL reached theaters. She had been living with ovarian cancer since 1990 and continued working through it. This was the final performance she gave the camera. She never lived to see the film reach an audience. None of that appears on screen exactly — nobody could have built it into the editing — but it is difficult to unknow once you know it, and it recolors a performance that begins with a joke about mortality. Beryl’s opening scene, delivered to a husband who has been dead for years, imagines God closing in on her house one lightning strike at a time. Tandy knew she was seriously ill when she spoke those words into a camera, for a film she would not live to see released.
The tea offer isn’t merely an offer, and it turns out the movie says so explicitly. Right after Sully’s “No, and how many times do I have to tell you?” Beryl doesn’t drop it: “Other people change their minds occasionally. I keep thinking you might.” Sully answers with a surprised “You do?” So it isn’t a ritual with a foregone conclusion on either side. She can recite his answer before he gives it, and she keeps asking anyway. Somewhere underneath the routine, she means it: some real, if modest, hope that today might be different. His surprise suggests he had filed the whole exchange away as a bit they do, never recognizing it as a standing invitation. The tea was never really about tea, but it wasn’t nothing either. It was Beryl checking, one more time, whether the door was open even a crack, dressed up as a beverage so neither of them had to admit what they were doing.
The final spoken line belongs to Sully, looking toward his dog, still waiting outside in the cold: “You may as well come in, too.” Nearly all of this closing exchange — the forgiveness, the tea, “I keep thinking you might,” the dog — tracks the final page of Russo’s novel with barely a change. Benton didn’t so much rewrite the ending as carry it across. Some things, apparently, don’t need translating twice.
Final Verdict: 85 out of 100.
