(courtesy IMDb)
In popular culture at large, Christmas is often seen in very distinct, sharply-realised ways.
It is variously a season of miracles or healing or wondrous discovery, and there is always some sort of point to proceedings whether it’s saving Christmas itself by helping Santa or doing a life-changing good deed or just drawing close to those you love.
It’s all very festively linear, with a beginning, a middle and a joyously rapturous end.
Not so in Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point, directed by Tyler Thomas Taormina to a screenplay he co-wrote with Eric Berger, where an Italian-American family have gathered at the ancestral home in the early Noughties for what is likely to be one last Christmas in this location. (Pinpointing the exact time is tricky because the film looks for all the world like a ’70s throwback but there are references to something happening in the year 2000 and people all have flip-phones which suggests a more modern era for a film which, with a part-Wes Anderson feel to it, seems happy to play fast and loose with time and place.)
Time is ticking on, demonstrated most dramatically when two of the teenage members of the clan sneak off to do Christmas their way which involves hanging out in the cold, drinking alcohol, making out (or not) in cars and shooting a metric ton of meaningless shit (which, to be fair to people with not much experience of life, feels really profound).
But while Emily (Matilda Fleming) and her likely cousin are out and about being teenagers and forging what they think are their own fresh, new traditions, the rest of the family, including her mum and dad, Kathleen (Maria Dizza) and Lenny (Ben Shenkman), are back at the big, noisy Christmas gathering trying to forge a celebration with people it’s close they’re not all especially close to.
But then, isn’t that vibe of pretty much all extended family get-togethers?
You know some families super well while others you see once a year, if that, and yet for one big festive gathering, you are supposed to draw near and act as if you’re as close as family is supposed to be.
But it becomes almost immediately apparent that while the family are warm and gleefully rambunctious, and that there is a comforting vibe from being together even if they’re not quite sure why they are still getting together – that’s never said outright but it’s clear as the night wears that people feel simultaneously reassured and trapped by traditions such as the traditional walk around the block in very cold temps – that there is a distance that comes from people who are inextricably linked by blood but separated, for all functional intents and purpose, by wildly disparate lives.
Kathleen isn’t immediately close to her mother, for instance, who sits around morosely much of the time, disengaged from the familial chaos surging almost organically around her – as an aside, if some people aren’t identified, it’s because this is a movie where it can be a challenge finding out names and who’s related to who and how – and Uncle Ray (Tony Savino) is secretly a writer, something that no one in the film knows and which we are only party because the story which is read out about near the end is drawn from a yellow envelope we’ve seen him carrying.
These two small moments are emblematic of the family as a whole, which is noisy and alive and together, on paper at least, and which likely looks back fondly on what Christmas Eve together means to them.
But Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point, which is really less of a linear, progressive narrative than a sense, a feeling, a vibe, all scenes jumbled together in a chaotic that accurately reflects what these events are often like, pulls back the overall sense of togetherness to expose just how separate these people really are, united by one night and not much else.
As a depiction of how family mythologies persist because we need them to, especially at times as iconic and meaningful as Christmas, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point excels, and its cast of diverse, if often confusingly revealed characters, really brings this messy truth alive.
If that’s where Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point had stopped, it might’ve have been the sort of classic film that underscored with quirky and whimsical intent, and an accurate eye for the bittersweet nature of family gatherings, what it is like to hold onto an idea when the reality has left it far behind.
But somewhere around where Emily sneaks out, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point fractures and we spend a little too much with the teenagers who, yes, are trying to find their own way and whose departure from the usual family rituals makes it plain how little life is left in them, and not enough time in the bosom of the Balsano family in their soon-to-be-sold Long island family redoubt (though most of the family don’t know that yet).
In its attempt to look Christmas family get-togethers with a sideway glance, and decided love for quirky weirdness – best exemplified by local cops, Office Gibson (Michael Cera) and Sergent Brooks (Gregg Turkington) who act very Keystone Cops-like and have conversations that suggest an undercurrent of something other than a collegial commitment to law enforcement – the film ends up splintering off into a strange ending that doesn’t quite work.
It also tries to mash together meaningful observation with off-kilter humour, and it’s this divergent approach that tries to be Christmassy and arthouse all at once and ends up doing justice to neither genre, that ultimately leaves you asking yourself what it is you just watched.
While full marks should be awarded to Taormina and Berger for deftly capturing the chaos and love of a festive family gathering in all its dysfunctional WTF-ness, and asking questions about when you should move on and admit that the old ways of doing things have had their way, yes, even much-loved annual festive ones, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point ultimately ends up nowhere in particular, and the impact of which, much like the Balsanos trying desperately to relate to each other and seeking lasting meaning where there is none (at least, not anymore), evaporates almost as soon as the credits start rolling.