The Holdovers, writer-director Alexander Payne’s unexpectedly wonderful new movie, is perfect holiday viewing if you’re longing for the kind of movie that used to be abundant and is now tragically scarce. It’s a warm, perceptive comedy-drama that makes you feel connected to your fellow human beings. It seems strange even typing that phrase, now such a thing of the past when it comes to Hollywood.

And Payne is conscious of how past it is in this lovingly realized period piece, set in the weeks leading up to and spanning Christmas through New Year’s 1970. Mesmerizingly realized in every detail, the film represents the fictional Barton Academy, a traditional old WASP prep school outside Boston, Massachusetts, in such a way as to remind you of cultural characteristics that are both not so long past, yet at the same time “as dead as the Dodo.” That’s how classics teacher and ancient history buff Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) would put it, only to get a typically rude and uncomprehending response from one of his teenage students: “As dead as the what?”

“A Barton man never lies,” is one of the truisms offered by Hunham, who can’t live up to the rule any more than his students can. But it’s touching to think there was ever a culture that invested in the belief that it could mold citizens in such impossibly virtuous ways.