Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point | 2024
The cast of Tyler Taormina’s CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER’S POINT. Courtesy of IFC Films. An IFC Films Release.
No matter your family situation, the holidays can often be a time of melancholy as much as they are a time of joy. It's part of their unique magic; that "sentimental feeling" often comes with reflections of those no longer with us, of warm (or perhaps not-so-warm) childhood memories now faded into grown-up responsibilities. Perhaps they've grown into new feelings of warmth as you watch your own children experience that magic you once felt, or perhaps that warmth has turned cold due to family conflicts or personal struggles. Whatever the circumstances, that mixture of sadness and excitement, heightened stress and breathless anticipation, is an emotional concoction unlike any other during the holiday season.
That mixture comes to a frothy head in Tyler Taormina's Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point, an ensemble comedy that examines the travails of one extended family as they converge on grandma's house for their annual Christmas Eve family get-together. It juxtaposes the carefree naïveté of youth - cousins sharing fleeting moments of annual bonding - with the more uneasy celebrations of the adults, which serve as both momentary distractions from and uneasy reminders of unspoken conflicts, old wounds still unhealed, and new challenges yet to be faced. Taormina doesn't bog down the film by saddling it with some kind of overarching plot that brings them all together, simply choosing to observe the various comings and goings of this vast family gathering, as their stories add up to create a portrait of familial discord and harmony, often existing in a tenuous balance.
Taormina's films are so observant and lived-in, and Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point gets at a certain unclassifiable magic of Christmas Eve family gatherings, both in their humdrum drudgery and the sometimes frayed connections that find tenuous reunions around the holidays. His Ham on Rye (2019) was a similarly astute observation of childhood memory and ritual, and it's fascinating to watch those ideas expand here.
Prismatic memories held together by shared traditions, fragments of broken people being monetarily restored by the comforts of going home; Taormina skillfully unites these disparate stories into something quietly remarkable. It's such a warm and loving film, but one that doesn't ignore the sometimes prickly complications of family dynamics. Juxtaposes the carefree naïveté of youth - cousins sharing fleeting moments of annual bonding - with the more uneasy celebrations of the adults, which serve as both momentary distractions from and uneasy reminders of unspoken conflicts. It's all very understated and unassuming but wholly sublime, a delicately thorny snow globe whose warm sense of nostalgia is tinged with an inescapable sense of sadness that gives its Christmas setting a disarmingly human core.
