CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER'S POINT - Mark Reviews Movies

Christmas Eve in Miller's Point, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | November 7, 2024

Watching Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is like walking into someone else's family party uninvited. We don’t know who anyone is, until we start to deduce names, faces, and relationships, and since it's neither our party nor our family, we quickly feel lost and out of place.

Co-writer/director Tyler Taormina, however, seems to have the opposite intention in mind. The movie never feels cold and distant, even when the snow starts to fall on the night of Christmas Eve and the story leaves the confines of the house to expand its view of the community surrounding it. There's a real warmth to the movie's look, provided by cinematographer Carson Lund's appreciation for decorative holiday lights, and Taormina's approach is all about intimacy—sticking close to its various characters and letting them reveal things about themselves, their relationships, and this family in little moments, captured when no one else is paying attention.

Obviously, this is a slice-of-life tale, in which there's no plot of which to speak, save for watching the set holiday traditions of this home unfold as they must have for years or decades before this night. Dinner is being cooked when we arrive. People spread out and talk about this or that while they wait for the festivities to begin. Dinner is served, and the desert spread is laid out with apologies and assertions that someone doesn't usually eat this much. Gifts are passed around and opened, and everyone is generally happy, except when the conversation turns to matters nobody really wants to discuss.

It's a nostalgic little movie that kind of hints at some thoughts that these family get-togethers usually have other things going on beneath their happy surfaces. This night will probably stick in the minds of the multiple kids running around and trying to stay awake for Santa Claus' arrival for the rest of their lives, just as the adults of a couple generations in the house have such fond memories of their own holiday parties that they keep the tradition going even now. One day, though, those kids might realize just how much was going on while they were eating, playing with gifts, and forcing their eyes open while sleeping on the floor in a single bedroom.

Honestly, though, what is happening here never feels significant enough to shatter or even diminish the feeling established by the imagery of this movie. It's too bright, cheery, and, when a child looks out the window to see the moon hanging at an impossible angle in the night sky, storybook-like to be anything other than, well, bright and cheery and like a storybook. The characters and the underlying conflicts—more suggested than confronted—are simply too hollow for us to feel any other way about what we're witnessing.

Witnessing is the right way to describe the sense of the movie, too, since Taormina and co-screenwriter Eric Berger don't even give us a single character through whom to experience this story. For a bit, it's Kathleen (Maria Dizzia), one child of the family matriarch whose house has been the center of these parties for a long time, and her family, mainly her husband Lenny (Ben Shenkman) and the couple's elder child Emily (Matilda Fleming). They're driving out to Long Island, joking and laughing about how uncomfortable these big gatherings can be, but as soon as they arrive at the house, things do become uncomfortably chaotic.

We're met with a flurry of faces, a few names, and only the hints of how any of these characters are connected to each other. One could argue that, since the movie is about the experience of being in the family, there's no need for character and relationship introductions. Everyone here knows everybody else, after all—who is whose parent, child, aunt, uncle, or cousin. Still, this isn't our family, and we're the outsiders who wind up feeling that way the entire time.

The movie communicates the gist of it, at least, such as that Uncle Matty (John Trischetti Jr.) lives in the house with Grandma Antonia (Mary Reistetter), that Michelle (Francesca Scorsese, who's one of a few children of well-known filmmakers in the movie) is Emily's cousin, and that Kathleen's other siblings, Uncle Ray (Tony Savino) and Aunt Bev (Grege Morris), have been in the middle of a tough conversation. Their mother's health is declining, and it's time for them to step up or to consider a care facility.

On and on it goes, with pleasantries becoming just a tinge awkward or difficult as the night continues. The number of characters and potential stories here is so overwhelming, though, that it's easy—too easy, perhaps—to be drawn to the movie's aesthetics, which are lovely and timeless (Only the presence of some older cellphones provide a notion of when the story is happening) enough to find some pleasure amidst the confusion.

As a mood piece, Christmas Eve in Miller's Point achieves a sense of the bittersweet nature of this kind of gathering. As an actual story about these characters and this family, it's missing some very basic elements.

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