Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
Directed by Tyler Taormina
Running time: 1hr47 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point
Something to know if you’re planning to maintain any kind of year-round relationship with me is that I’m a Christmas person, and a particular one at that: the decorations, music, timings, meal planning and even the Christmas Eve potato salad all have to be just so. (You can try to fight me on my “no turkey, no blue fairy lights, no presents before breakfast” credo, but it will be ugly, and boring to boot.) So it stands to reason that I’m equally fussy when it comes to Christmas movies, which is to say I don’t like a lot of supposed seasonal standards. They have to be cosy but not too folksy, a vibes-based middle ground that rules out everything from Elf (cold and smarmy) to The Holiday (trying way too hard) to Miracle on 34th Street (weirdly claggy, like being injected with eggnog), but somehow allows for the none-folksier It’s a Wonderful Life, just because.
All of which is to say that any new Christmas movie faces a long, subjective and mostly irrational set of criteria to land with me, but Tyler Taormina’s gorgeous, wistful, candlelight-warmed Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point hit every one — even when it premiered in the unseasonally springy climes of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Soft and frayed as a hand-me-down jumper, comfortingly bleary as a mulled-wine buzz, it’s a film by someone who’s evidently at least as much of a Christmas person as I am: attentive and attached to holiday traditions that mostly aren’t mine, or probably yours, but are snugly relatable in their longstanding specificity. The word “mood piece” is generally applied to films of overriding menace or anxiety; in Taormina’s film, all the duelling moods of the season, shifting by the hour from affection to aggravation to ebullience to melancholy, coalesce into one of sturdy, nostalgic goodwill to all men.
The story, such as it is, is scatty and supple. One chilly Christmas Eve in the early 2000s, the Balsanos, an extended Italian-American family, gather for what may be their last such holiday together at the ancestral home in Long Island. The vignettes that ensue — hinged on disagreements, misunderstandings and occasional bonding across four generations — are expected, in much the same way that Christmas holds few surprises for most of us every year. Adults and children alike separate into their favoured cliques and alliances, kvetching and gossiping in various rooms and nooks of the house, whether labouring over food prep or staring at video games. Amid the natter and hum, teen cousins Emily (Matilda Fleming) and Michelle (Francesca Scorsese) slip out of the house for their own night-before-Christmas adventure — a disarmingly ordinary escapade, nonetheless charged with the rush of giggly adolescent rebellion.
Nothing dangerous or untoward is on the menu here, as family pulls even its most reluctant members back with the lure of stodgy casseroles from by-heart recipes, makeshift beds with mothballed blankets and and an altogether hazardous number of tiny lights on. Taormina, working in a far cuddlier vein than in his eerie adolescent mystery Ham on Rye, updates the twinkly Americana of Norman Rockwell and Frank Capra from a millennial viewpoint that acknowledges grimmer, more cynical realities, but keeps them at bay for at least these few days a year. What is Christmas spirit if not an exercise in sincere, joyful denial?
CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER’S POINT (2024) Written by Tyler Taormina | Shot by Carson Lund, Eric Berger | Edited by Kevin Anton