At 1:57, Lydia walks down the hall wearing neutral colored hosiery. But when she walks into Professor Hunham's classroom, she is wearing opaque white hosiery.
In the scene where Paul Hunham (Giamatti) learns from Dr. Woodrup (Garman) he will be monitoring the holdovers, the fountain pen Dr. Woodrup was using jumps from side to side of the paper he was writing on.
When Angus is skating on the Boston Common ice rink, his jacket front is covered with ice shavings before he face-plants and clean after he gets up.
During the chapel scene, the blinds of the swell box on the pipe organ switch between being open and closed in cuts between the priest and shots from the balcony.
After Hunham has set the plate of cookies on the table, Angus excuses himself. The next shot has the arrangement of the cookies on the plate altered without any person or reason to have done so.
After Paul finds a bottle of Angus' Librium (chlordiazepoxide), he points out it's for depression. In reality, Librium is predominantly prescribed for anxiety with no connection to the treatment of depression.
Tully dislocates his shoulder, a painful condition that requires weeks or months of rehab before the shoulder is back to normal. Yet he is out of his sling, carrying heavy items, obviously completely unimpaired within a couple of days.
The composing credit for the Christmas carol "Carol of the Drum (Little Drummer Boy)" is incorrectly credited as "Traditional". It was composed by Katherine K. Davis in 1941.
The composing credit for the Christmas carol "Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht" (Silent Night) is incorrectly credited as "Traditional". It was composed by Franz Gruber in 1818.
On Curtis Lamb's photo, he wears the National Defense Service Medal ribbon. During the Vietnam War, it was awarded to soldiers after serving 90 days of active duty. Soldiers had their photo taken during the first week of basic training, so he would not have not been eligible for the medal.
Paul Giamatti's "lazy eye" moves back and forth between the right and left eye. This has been revealed as intentional.
Hunham orders a Jim Beam on the rocks, and is served a double Jim Beam, no ice.
However, when Lydia delivers his drink, she says she made it a double without charging him.
However, when Lydia delivers his drink, she says she made it a double without charging him.
There are several outdoor scenes set in snowy, cold winter weather, but no breath vapor is visible as characters speak or exhale.
Jason's father arrives to pick him up in a 1979 Bell model 206B. However, his father is the head of the parent company of Sikorsky Helicopters, so it is unlikely he would be flying in a helicopter made by their chief rival. (Sikorsky was sold to Lockheed Martin in 2015)
At the Christmas Eve party, an aluminum tree is part of the decorations, with a string of electric lights on it. Aluminum trees were almost never strung with electric lights, due to the chance of the tree shorting out the circuit breaker. They were typically illuminated by a "color wheel" light, projected onto the tree from the floor.
When Paul and Angus go to the "packie" (liquor store) in Cambridge, the sign on the front shows open hours on Sunday. In 1970, Massachusetts still had "Blue Laws" that forbade liquor stores to open on Sunday.
At 1 hour and 36 minutes into the movie, Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa are walking on a street in front of several Boston shops, behind them, an Apple iMac computer can be seen in the shop window.
Around 1 hour 24 minutes into the movie, even though all cars on the highway are from older times, you can easily see a row of modern vehicles parked along a side street behind the separation wall of the highway.
In the skating scene in Boston park, the Christmas lights in the background are LEDs, which are not used in Christmas lights until year 2000's.
At just before 90 minutes into this movie Giamatti is confronted by a sex-worker in an outside bookstore who asks him if he wants some "candy cane." He says he's pre-diabetic. This was not a term in the 1970's and was not a term used until 1997.
Hunham talks about the three-year siege of Carthage during the Third Punic War and concludes by saying that this is where the term "punitive" comes from. The word "punitive" derives from the Latin verb "punire", meaning "punish". This is etymologically unrelated to "Punic", which instead shares its origin with "Phoenician" (Carthage was founded by Phoenicians).
Hunham greets his class of students with the Latin "salve". This is a greeting for a single person; the plural equivalent is "salvete".