‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’ Review: A Nostalgic Family Gathering

(Baby) It’s cold outside. Strings of gaudy rainbow lights twinkle from gables. In cozy living rooms, grandmothers and great aunts doze in their chairs while middle-aged siblings bicker and booze it up around the dining table. Little kids squirm in makeshift beds trying to stay awake for Santa, while truculent teenagers sneak out into the suburban night to do secret teenager things. Ok, so there are no chestnuts roasting on an open fire — instead there is a salad bowl full to the gluttonous brim with red and green M&Ms — but in almost every other respect Tyler Taormina‘s delightful stocking-stuffer “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is as alive to the domesticated magic of holiday tradition as any Nat King Cole seasonal classic. And probably even more so: Taormina’s fondly multivalent, Millennial-Norman-Rockwell perspective incorporates a child’s experience of the holiday, overlaid with a teen’s and a parent’s and a grandparent’s and a cousin’s and an in-law’s and so on. It feels as though all his Christmases have come at once. 

It is sometime in the early 2000s and the chattering ensemble that represents four sprawling generations of the Italian-American Balsano family, is loosely centered on one of its many tangled branches. Teenager Emily (Matilda Fleming) is at That Age and engaged in an unexplained war of sulky attrition with her mother Kathleen (Maria Dizzia), while her father (Ben Shenkman) drily steels himself for an evening with the in-laws as they drive to Kathleen’s family home on Long Island. En route they pass by a police cruiser in which the world’s two most ineffectual traffic cops, played by Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington, sit in a silence that is loaded, as we’ll later discover, with quaintly unexpressed homoerotics.

Kathleen and Emily’s dynamic is echoed in the slightly standoffish greeting Kathleen gives her aging mother. She knows she doesn’t visit as much as she should but things gets so busy, she explains to no one in particular. The teeming house quickly divides itself along loosely generational lines, with the younger cohort gathering in the den where their cousin is playing videogames, while Emily and her cousin Michelle (a charming Francesca Scorsese, who might rep Italian-American New York royalty but does so with down-to-earth warmth) gossip over their fliphones and occasionally pay court to their doting grandparents. Later, she and Emily will encounter a disaffected local played by Sawyer Spielberg, but here too nepo-baby stunt casting is appropriate: Who better than a Spielberg to show up in a celebration of suburban American family life? Meantime, the grown-up siblings and their spouses — the organizers, cooks, drinkers and squabblers-in-chief — convene in little conclaves over cigars in the garage or wine in the kitchen to trade news, fret about the health of their mother and debate the potential sale of house. This might be their last Christmas here. 

Eventually, Emily and Michelle give their elders the slip and venture into town to hang out and score beers and couple up (Michelle with a waitress played by “Eighth Grade”s Elsie Fisher), in a way that somewhat recalls Taormina’s lovely and strange debut, “Ham on Rye.” But where that film put a surreal, dreamily satirical twist on the American prom ritual, “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” plays its traditions straight, with a sincerity and sentimentality so brazen it borders on the avant garde. It’s oddly heartwarming to know that while for many of us, memories of family Christmases exist only in a messy blur, clearly Taormina, his co-writer Eric Berger, and perhaps especially his production designer Paris Petersen, were paying closer attention. They render their ur-Christmas movie, that dangles like a tree ornament on a string of tinsel stretched between Vincente Minnelli’s “Meet Me In St. Louis” and the kind of late-90s TV commercial where insurance companies delivered happy-holidays hokum to their customers, in almost fetishistically fanatical detail.

Whatever surreality there is here comes from coupling this radically simple premise to a gloriously overstuffed aesthetic of suburban abundance, in which everything sparkles and glows and tables groan under the weight of a hundred assorted casserole dishes. Even those moments that threaten drama or conflict – like a certain manuscript left on a hall table, or a certain missing pet lizard — turn into benign anticlimaxes: every Chekov’s gun loaded with nothing but glitter and candy. From a soundtrack spackled with Sinatra and 60s pop classics, to the hyper-romantic, gauzy visuals delivered by DP Carson Lund (whose directorial debut “Eephus,” which Taormina produces, is also in Directors’ Fortnight) to the unquestioning presentation of weird family rituals as completely normal, there is no War on Christmas here, just a wholehearted surrender to its folksy, kitschy pleasures. It leaves you with the warmest, fuzziest of feelings, and a renewed resolve to be home for Christmas, if only in your dreams.