If you’re looking for some counterprogramming to your Hallmark movies and your Hot Frostys, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point may be just the thing. The entire movie is somehow both completely familiar and incredibly specific—a lot of what we see is exactly what we might expect from a Christmas movie, and then a lot of how it happens could only come from a person’s very real memories. It’s curious, unusual, and a little bit mesmerizing.
The movie’s director and co-writer, Tyler Thomas Taormina, says he grew up on Long Island in exactly the kind of family we see, an enormous Italian-American family that’s gathered at the matriarch’s house for Christmas, with the adult siblings poking fun at each other and trying to hash out what to do with their aging mother and her home, with the young kids running around goofing off, and with the teenagers stuck in their strange limbo where they’d rather be doing anything—anything—other than this. And for a while we feel like we’ve seen all this before: it’s kind of broadly silly and loud, and I admit it took a bit for me to get on the movie’s wavelength. Or, maybe more accurately, the movie’s wavelength changes.
To be sure, there’s plenty in the early part of the film that made me laugh, although a lot of the jokes in the background hit better than the more obvious ones, other than the salami-wrapped sesame sticks, which are brilliant. Then again, those seem like something that’s so tied to an actual memory that they couldn’t be just a joke, and I suspect if you grew up in a large family like this one, a whole lot more will connect with you. But it’s that dedication to memory, and the feelings that come with it, that make this movie shine. And when we go off in a much different direction partway through, as the teenagers finally make their escape, the whole vibe shifts and we’re given time and space to reflect and contemplate in a way we never could have expected. We’re reminded all of these things are a part of family and the holidays, and it’s a lot more complex for all of us than we might recognize.
Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is on VOD.
