Joyce Glasser reviews Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point (November 15, 2024) Cert 12A, 107 mins.
Christmas films come in all genres, but what you wouldn’t expect is a film that does what it says on the tin: it invites the viewer in to experience with no narration, introductions or favoured position – the Balsano family Christmas reunion on Long Island. It might be the family’s last in the ancestral home – as though director and writer (with Eric Berger) Tyler Thomas Taormina’s (Ham on Rye) film is a kind of ghost of Christmases past.
If attending your own large, noisy, multi-generational family gathering, with games, presents, home movies and tables sagging with the weight of food and drink is enough to illicit an allergic reaction, this may not be the film for you. Even if you are moved by the nostalgia of a fading tradition, the film might be off-putting.
One reason is that the cast is large – around 30 characters – but it gets larger when it opens up and family members go into the town. For most of the film the party guests move around family matriarch Antonia’s (Mary Reistetter) well lived in suburban house and we go with them, but without a guide. We are there to observe and experience and pick up threads. But learning who is who with names not always available and keeping track of how the characters are related is a struggle.
Hearing the dialogue might also be challenging, particularly for old viewers. Such nostalgic favourites as the Ronettes Baby I Love You, The Sherrys’ My Guy, Little Peggy March’s I Will Follow Him and Nick Nelson’s Fools Rush In compete with the dialogue and help obscure it. It doesn’t help that we only get snippets of conversations at a time.
A central conflict among the adults is that Antonia, who holds court from an armchair as the guests arrive, is losing her mental and physical faculties. Antonia’s son Matthew (John Trischetti Jr.) who lives in the house with his wife Bev (Grege Morris), complains that the responsibility has become too onerous.
He proposes selling the house and putting Antonia in Sunrise Care Home. Matt’s widowed brother Ray (Tony Savino), a poseur with a manuscript and a hidden talent, is adamant that no one is selling mum’s house.
One by one, Antonia’s four children are introduced and, somewhere along the line, their children and spouses. First, we meet Antonia’s daughter Kathleen (Maria Dizzia, My Old Ass), her husband Lenny (Ben Shankman) and their teenage children Emily (Matilda Fleming) and son Andrew (Justin Longo). As they enter, loaded with presents wrapped to match the Christmas tree, they are smothered in kisses while Kathleen finds her mother.
This daughter-mother greeting is short and frosty enough for us to suspect there’s a story there to uncover. This relationship is reflected in Kathleen’s relationship with her daughter, as it appears that Emily deeply resents her mother.
Kathleen’s sister Elyse (Maria Carucci) is married to controlling Ron (Steve Alleva) who likes to be the centre of attention and manages that by cooking the feast. Kathleen and Elyse have two brothers: Matthew and Ray mentioned above.
Just in case a film with all white characters is too exclusive, there are Black and Asian family and guests to complete a cornucopia of good cheer – except for signs of rebellion and old wounds that fester underneath. All that is forgotten when, before sitting down to dinner everyone goes out to cheer on the brightly lit local fire engine.
After dinner there is a very long sequence in which the teens go out on the town to hook up with old friends, meet new ones and explore their sexuality. It has the feel of a lesser American Graffiti as we focus on rebellious Emily who sneaks out of the house with her intrepid cousin Michelle (Francesca Scorsese) to meet friends.
They come into contact with three loafers hanging out in a graveyard (including another nepo baby Sawyer Spielberg) and two police officers (Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington) who pop up throughout the film, the pair freezing cold on their graveyard shift. The two surreal cops with their existential melancholy seem to have wandered in from a Wes Anderson film and the style is a jolting.
There are some nice touches, as when Kathleen goes upstairs to cheer up a little, ailing boy with a silly jig, party guest Isabelle (JoJo Cincinnati) falls asleep in a stair lift, inadvertently pressing a button, and others that mix the banal with the significant, suggesting both are crucial to memories. The film is a huge, random tapestry of people and memories – someone else’s – that never affect us.
Not every film needs a plot, but a kind of narrative, as opposed to random episodes and a parade of characters, helps to involve the audience so that the emotions are not the characters’ alone. While some viewers might appreciate Taormina’s unusual take on a holiday movie, others might find themselves drifting off with Isabelle.
