The great Christmas film of 2023 arrives unseasonably late, deep into January, like a drunken carouser who has lost track of the time. The Holdovers is a scratchy human drama, set in a mothballed boys’ boarding school and circling a sad, lopsided Norwegian spruce. The message of festive good cheer, such as it is, comes delivered by Paul Giamatti in the role of a cantankerous classics teacher. “I find the world a bitter and complicated place,” he declares. “And it seems to feel the same way about me.”

The film’s director, Alexander Payne, has never suffered a Christmas as lonesome as the one in The Holdovers. But a few occasions have come close; his 60th birthday springs to mind. “I was having to isolate because I had Covid,” he says. “So I was all alone in my apartment. Friends would bring food and leave it by my door.” But on balance, he says, the landmark big day could have been a lot worse.

Mishap, misery and redeeming acts of human kindness: these are the themes that speak to Payne as a film-maker. These are the squabbling forces that power his best work, be it 2004’s Oscar-winning Sideways (which sent Giamatti’s failed writer on a tour of California wine country) or 2013’s Nebraska (in which a blasted Bruce Dern ran down the American dream). The tone can be skittish; the emotional weather keeps shifting.

This is just as Payne likes it – it keeps the audience on its toes. “The Greeks have a word: harmolipi,” he says. “Happiness and sadness together, combined. In Greece, the two masks were always put together. ‘Bittersweet’ might be the best way to describe it in English.”

Our interview is only minutes old, but we could almost be in the classroom at The Holdovers’ Barton Academy. The director carries himself like a wolfish academic. He is authoritative and exacting, steeped in film history and accustomed to shooting down dilettantes. “I always say that I make comedies,” he says by way of introduction. “John Ford used to say: ‘I’m John Ford and I make westerns.’ I say: ‘I’m Alexander Payne and I make comedies,’ because I try to maintain a comic attitude, even towards dramatic material. Keep it nimble, keep it charming. But that’s life, isn’t it? And it’s a corny analogy, but life isn’t single notes, it’s chords. Minor keys and major keys. Harmolipi, bittersweet.”

Whatever one cares to call it, the formula pays off beautifully in The Holdovers, a film that pundits are tipping as a leading Oscar contender and that Barack Obama selected as one of his highlights of the year. It’s a loose-boned, lovely thing, unhurried and involving. Giamatti stars as the misanthropic Paul Hunham, marooned at Barton Academy over the Christmas break and presiding over a dysfunctional makeshift family that includes the school’s grief-stricken cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and a slouching, troubled student (the newcomer Dominic Sessa). “I realise that none of us is here because we want to be,” Hunham concedes near the start, thereby establishing the tension that the film must resolve. The winter gloom duly lifts. The broken pieces make a whole. As with Payne’s 60th birthday, this holiday might not be such a lost cause after all.

Fittingly for a film about misfits in limbo, The Holdovers is also bloody-mindedly out of step with the times. It’s not so much that the tale relocates Payne from his favoured pancake-flat midwest to a snowbound Massachusetts of melancholic mill towns and white-water rivers. It’s not even that his Christmas movie seems to have been delayed in the post. It’s simply that The Holdovers is in thrall to the bygone 70s era of American film-making, to the point where it moves beyond homage or pastiche.

The 70s influence runs through the picture like lettering through Brighton rock, from the setting (December 1970) to the technique (lots of slow pans and dissolves) to the plot’s brawling, two-fisted emotional punch (earthy one moment, brazenly sentimental the next).

Payne points out that the print is stamped with a 1971 date, to give the impression that it was shot in 1970 and released the following year – as though the film is a visitor from the past, conceivably still smelling of patchouli oil and cigarettes. “And then, maybe unconsciously, our selection of that date has something to do with today. Because it’s a film about a loss of direction in the country as a whole. Maybe it also has a certain anti-authoritarian streak. So how do those qualities parallel or comment on what we are going through?”

I have no doubt that they do, but I suspect that the film stands alone. The business has changed; films run to a quicker rhythm. Or, to put it more bluntly, how many other old-school American movies does Payne see being produced at the moment?

“Well, join me in thinking it through,” the director says, easing himself back into tutorial mode. “As far as comedy goes, where is something like Groundhog Day today? Where is Trading Places? Where, for that matter, is Terms of Endearment? The solidly built, intelligent comedy-drama? Where is the well-made adult drama with visual scope? Where is Out of Africa or The English Patient?” He fears it’s mostly Marvel movies or bust. “If someone doesn’t fly in your film, they won’t give you the money to make it anyway.”

It was Payne’s fate to come in at the tail end of the era he reveres, catching the last wave of the 70s-style auteurist cinema otherwise known as the 90s indie scene. He scored a breakout hit with the pitch-perfect Election, pitting Matthew Broderick’s stricken teacher against Reese Witherspoon’s nightmare pupil. He followed that up by showcasing probably the last great Jack Nicholson performance in 2002’s About Schmidt.

Since then, it has been tricky; every film is a struggle. “Nebraska, in particular, was very hard to get financed, because I wanted it in black and white. Even at $14m, which is chump change for these [studio] people, it was very hard to get made. The Descendants was easier, because I had George Clooney on board – ‘Look at this big, shiny thing.’ And Downsizing was a different beast, a bigger girth, and I could say: ‘Hey look, it’s Matt Damon.’ I mean, that was Downsizing – it sure looked good on paper.”

I confess, I liked Downsizing. Most others did not. Payne’s 2017 science-fiction comedy proved too ambitious and mercurial for its own good. It sputtered with the critics and bombed at the box office. He has weathered the storm, but in the moment it hurt: “You lick your wounds for a second, but what can you do? You pick yourself up and move on.” He casts back through his mental archive of film flops. “Brian De Palma had a wonderful quote after making Bonfire of the Vanities. He said: ‘You’re no one in Hollywood until you’ve brought a studio to its knees.’”

Payne was raised in Omaha, Nebraska, a world away from the action, in a Greek-American family, the youngest of three brothers. As a kid, he often hated the place. It was a conservative “cow town”; he couldn’t wait to get out. Omaha, though, was to be the making of him, providing the foundation – the spirit – for most of his movies. I suggest that it might even count as a character in its own right, but he scoffs at the notion. I feel as if I have fluffed an exam. He says: “Yeah, landscape as character. It is an oft‑used phrase.”

These days, he maintains an apartment in Los Angeles and a base in his home town. He explains that Omaha has changed; it’s a lot more liberal and groovy. “But one of the reasons that I live there is family. My father has gone. Both of my brothers are now deceased. And my mother has just turned 100 years old. So, really, it has fallen on me to keep a close eye on her.”

The Holdovers complete, Payne is between jobs. He is interested in shooting a sequel to Election, again starring Witherspoon, but the script needs some fine‑tuning. Alternatively, he would like to utilise his Greek passport and produce a picture in Europe. Whichever direction he jumps, though, it’s likely to result in another tragicomedy; another tale of outcasts, malcontents and the barely-getting-by.

It’s a juxtaposition, Payne admits. Most of the movies he likes – the pictures of real substance – are about the dispossessed, the underclass. And yet these are made by film-makers who, in cultural terms, are successful – the very top of the tree.

I ask if that includes him. He winces at the presumption. He says: “I am nothing compared to Charlie Chaplin. And he played a homeless guy.”

But is that how he sees himself: as a successful human being?

“Jesus,” he says, all but throwing up his hands. “I guess you really did run out of questions.”

Except that school is not quite out; we still have a few minutes left. “This is going to be a real downer of an answer, but I recently had a brother die of pancreatic cancer,” says Payne. “Watching him go through that process gave me a fine perspective. Anything you go through in life, trust me, you’re in pretty good shape if you don’t have pancreatic cancer.”

He regroups and reconsiders. “How about a more rosy answer?” he says. “I feel very lucky to be a film-maker. Lucky that I was born in a period where movies even existed. Lucky I got to like them. Lucky I got to make them and to have some modicum of success. So, yes, on that level, I feel very successful. And the older I get, the more lucky and grateful I feel. Which is kind of what happens. Isn’t that how life works?”

• The Holdovers is released in the UK on 19 January