Alexander Payne has too strong of a filmography to declare that The Holdovers is his best work, but the comedy might be the most caustically concentrated realization of his career-long treatise on the way loneliness delivers a pile driver to the human soul. So firmly ensconced in the culture of a nineteen-seventies boarding school that it might as well have a student ID issued to it, the film spans a winter break where widely loathed classics teacher Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is charged with chaperoning the handful of pupils who have nowhere else to go during the holidays. After that cohort is reduced to a single angry misfit (Dominic Sessa), a slow, tentative bonding process takes place between the teacher and student, sometimes aided and sometimes complicated by the school’s grief-stricken kitchen manager (Da’Vine Joy Randolph, masterful in the role). David Hemingson’s screenplay is filled with humor that causes the laughter to catch in the throat a bit, impeded by wincing contractions in response to the relatable misery the characters grind through. Payne doesn’t soften his blows, but there are no cheap shots either. In his empathetic reckoning, even difficult people deserve consideration and can achieve moments of grace. Wise as Payne’s storytelling is, the film success is balanced on the slumped shoulders of Giamatti. The veteran actor makes Paul Hunham into a grand comic creation that is still resonantly human as he verbosely rails against the philistines before him. The Holdovers is almost unimaginable without him. Anyone else in the role would likely default to caricature or easy pathos. Giamatti mines complexity. Presumably, professor Hunham wouldn’t have it any other way.