Final Rating: 3/5
There’s a dreamlike quality to Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point, the latest from director Tyler Thomas Taormina. Taormina invites the audience to spend the holiday with the large Balsano family, somewhere in the suburbs of New York, sometime between the early 90’s and early 00’s.
The Balsano family is full of entertaining and familiar personalities. Uncle Ray (Tony Savino), the tough guy of the family, has secret ambitions of being a writer. Victoria (Jordan Barringer), one of the younger members of the family, recently married an Asian man, Ty (Leo Chan), which some relatives don’t quite know how to talk about.
Uncle Matthew (John Trischetti Jr.), who’s hosting the party, lives with Grandma Isabelle ( JoJo Cincinnati), and is starting to look for a retirement home for her, much to the dismay of his siblings. Meanwhile, Emily (Matilda Fleming) and Michelle (Francesca Scorsese), two of the youngest of the family, are about to sneak out for a night of pre-Noel teenage rebellion.
Christmas Eve is realized as a series of these intersecting personal narratives. Taormina is excellent at building believable interactions to flesh out his characters. After a fight with his siblings, Uncle Matthew spends the rest of the night trying to get away from his family, only to keep ending up in the same room as Uncles Ray (Tony Savino) and Ronald (Steve Alleva).
In contrast to the older members’ disillusionment with the holiday, the younger boys crowd around a shiny new Xbox, five- and six-year-olds transfixed as their teenage cousin kills terrorists in some nondescript military shooter. Before anyone else can get a turn, someone realizes no one’s seen “Drakenfire” in a minute, and one of the boys is sent into a terrifying, dark room of the basement to retrieve the family’s pet iguana.
Uncle Ray’s story is the standout, spanning the entire emotional spectrum. Between his constant spats with his siblings, Ray excitedly checks in with his son about the latest chapter he’s written. As his son rattles off “I think it’s the best thing you’ve written,” it’s clear he mostly wants his dad out of the room so he can continue whatever else it was he was doing.
When Ray’s sister Kathleen (Maria Dizzia) discovers his writing later on, drunkenly reading it aloud to jeers from the other adults, it’s immediately heartbreaking… until the closing paragraph, reflecting on the terrible nature of regret, strikes a chord with his siblings, and vindicates him as a writer.
Taormina favours these little stories over an overarching one in Christmas Eve. The film feels like the answer to the question “remember that party when we were kids?” As he drifts between characters, Taormina paints a nostalgic picture rich in texture and encourages the audience to map their own experiences onto his Christmas Eve.
Perhaps you have a fond memory of sneaking out of a mandatory family gathering at Grandma’s house; maybe you remember the talk with your siblings regarding putting Mom in a home; what about that time your sister came home with the husband no one had ever quite gotten on with?
Cinematographer Carson Lund works the same feeling into the look of the film. Christmas Eve takes place primarily inside a warmly lit house that feels larger inside than out. Locations around town feel real enough to be important, but vague enough to be anywhere. Occasionally, major events such as a fire department parade or a caravan of teenagers driving up to a secluded parking lot are rendered in such low frame rate as to look like a series of blurry photographs. As if the effect of the night is remembered more than the actual events.
In that way, Christmas Eve feels both highly personal to the filmmakers and instantly familiar.
Thank you to Touchwood PR and MUBI for the screener.
