Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point

“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” could be described as “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” as “Cahiers du Cinéma’s Christmas Vacation.” If you get that reference, then this movie might be for you, and if you don’t, and if you’re looking for something to stream in the next two weeks and happen to notice this one has Christmas Eve in the title and Michael Cera in the cast, I might advise you to just keep scrolling. Director Tyler Taormina’s IFC Films-distributed movie does not so much tell the story of the sprawling Balsano family’s gathering at Grandma’s home in the fictional Long Island town of the title for their annual night-before-Christmas celebration as just airdrop us into a virtual crockpot of atmosphere, or what the kidz call vibes. There are innumerable characters and several strands of story, even a brief reference to the family being one of “hardened criminals,” but it is beside the point to round them up out of interest to the consumer as a normal review might. That’s not to say there aren’t some individual personalities sprinkled throughout, there are, but that the movie is more interested in a kind of cacophonous cumulative effect of those personalities, as if we are all Joe Pesci at the beginning of “Home Alone” impersonating a cop as the boisterous McAllister clan moves to-and-fro around him.

If there is a main character in “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point,” it is cinematographer Carson Lund’s camera. It drifts and roams, Robert Altman-like, throughout the Balsano house, and then outside the Balsano house as the kids eventually venture into the night in search of respite from their parents, moving from one person to another, picking up parts of different conversations, sometimes even hearing a question and then not sticking around to record the answer, evoking how it is more concerned with capturing ambiance than information. Indeed, this is not a movie made of moments, as such narrative-less movies often are, but of something more specific than that, of sensory moments, as if the entire movie has been sculpted from little flashes that stick in our brains from so many Christmases past and then float back to the top when the end of the year rolls around again. When the camera lingers over a smattering of green and red M&Ms floating in the air, it is at once a wistful and sharp-eyed assessment of how commercialism and Christmas go hand-in-hand, and how the holiday season, for many, is this constant triggering of other sensory memories. In the span of just a few seconds it made me think of how when I think of my own Christmases, I see the gold carton of a quart of Anderson Erickson eggnog, or, heaven help me, hear the music of those Holiday Greetings from Budweiser television ads. I often felt the way Uncle Ray (Tony Sabino) looks as they gather together to watch old home movies, head up, mouth slightly agape, entranced, like he’s momentarily outside his own body.  

The closest “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” comes to any kind of traditional plot point is the Balsano home’s future, with one of the grown kids wanting to put it up for sale while other members of the clan argue against it. That might have fueled an entire movie, building to a confrontation, or resolution, but here, the resolution is dropped in the middle, and tellingly mentioned in passing – the house already is sold but no one knows. In effect, it transforms the remainder of the movie into a memory, as if the present is giving way to the past before our very eyes, embodying the feeling of nostalgia that goes hand-in-hand with holidays. That nostalgia coalesces in a shot of Grandma sitting alone in a chair and looking out the frosted windows, happiness and sadness for what’s gone meeting so heart-stoppingly in the middle that you can’t even tell them apart.