It’s Christmas Eve. A night for loved ones to come together, to share stories and to celebrate. But it can also be a time of obligations. A time of forced smiles and of deceitful behaviour. While spreading good cheer, we try not to also spread whatever negative feelings that have been plaguing our minds during the other 364 days of the year.
For the extensive Balsano family, it will prove to be a little bit of everything. Gathering together at their ancestral Long Island home, a whopping four generations of relations celebrate the holidays including mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, nieces, nephews, one and all. Those new to the family are welcomed as the growing number of those who aren’t with them anymore are remembered.
This year proves to be different, however. With the matriarch requiring more and more care every day (and night), her children debate whether it’s time to finally sell the house from under her. As the mood and the gravy flow hot and cold over the night, the adults drink to their merriment while the youngest go to bed awaiting Santa’s visit. Meanwhile, those in between the two worlds, the teenagers, Emily (Matilda Fleming) and Michelle (Francesca Scorsese) sneak off with the intent to claim the winter wonderland for themselves in a night of teenage rebellion and mischief.
Growing up in a large Italian family on Long Island with 50 years’ worth of Christmas traditions, it’s easy to see where director Tyler Taormina drew his inspirations from. When he and his writing partner Eric Berger discussed their childhood holidays, a familiar trend became apparent, that of traditions, excess, celebrations and decorations almost for their own sake. But through these superfluities come the memories and events which shape the rest of our lives.
Christmas movies have become tradition in their own way. There are specific films that we sit down to watch every year with the family as part of our celebrations. Taormina is of course inspired by these himself, but in his own style which sees less focus put on a consistently structured plot. Flowing from one character to another, sometimes even to family pets, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is more a series of vignettes than it is a story with a beginning, middle and end. In this way, it is not so much a “family Christmas movie” and is more rather a “movie about a family at Christmas”.
There isn’t really a consistent tone, character journey, nor plot to the film. What the filmmakers are much more interested in is replicating that sense of memory and familiarity millions of people have looking back at the holidays. Bizarre traditions, peculiar dishes an uncle makes every year, random Christmas music played non-stop, the limited edition red and green M&Ms (many misshapen) overfilling a glass bowl…
The movie is nostalgia, nostalgia, nostalgia all the way through. Regardless of whether you’re not American, or you don’t even celebrate Christmas, there’s something to find in Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point that reminds us of our own traditions, family, friends, and childhoods.
The performances and storylines feel very real. Much of the cast are simply friends or relations of the filmmakers themselves, with little acting experience (this movie features both a Spielberg AND a Scorsese in bit parts). The film’s most recognisable cast members, Michael Cera (who also produced the film… with 30 other people) and Gregg Turkington rather than provide recognisable faces for audiences to latch onto, feel completely alien. The pair play two near mute police officers who, along with some crazy woman obsessed with kids going through her dumpster, feel like they belong in a completely different movie.
Besides those poor examples, the acting otherwise comes off as natural. Particularly that from the absolute youngest children who simply bustle around playing with each other as the night goes on. This isn’t a Hollywood movie where the precocious 5 year old gives awkwardly delivered life lessons to the adult trying to save his family’s Christmas. It’s simply human beings of all ages going about their own December 24th.
The pacing of the film, for the most part, is very fitting as well. The apprehension of arriving at the party, the burst of greetings amongst family, the awkward jokes which don’t always land, the lethargy as everyone drifts into their own groups… Finally, we’re just tired, want the party to wrap up, desire for us to be released from our obligations, and to leave. Although, final part is sadly where the film’s already untraditional structure hits a brick wall.
As we cease to follow the events and members of the Balsano clan we’ve come to know, the focus largely shifts to that of local teenagers. The film ceases to have a “Martin Scorsese directs a Christmas movie” feel. Instead, it is more like if Larry Clarke (Kids, Ken Park) did the same. It may be familiar and nostalgic in its own way, but it is at odds with what little stable ground Taormina gives us up to this point. Established characters and subplots vanish altogether, substituted by an entirely new cast of adolescents that we have no vested interest in.
This is not in any way a traditional Christmas movie, to say the least, but one which is built on traditions and familiarity. We can see ourselves in the Balsano family and Tyler Taormina successfully presents a night of celebration playing on our joint sentimentalism. He just stumbles quite spectacularly in its closing, not comfortably bridging the gap between the two types of movies he wanted to make.
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is in cinemas from November 14.