CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER’S POINT is a movie that I heard about last Christmas but it wasn’t on video yet. Some people were really flipping for it and that’s really all I knew about it, so I checked it out when I saw it was on blu-ray this week.

I think what they were responding to is that it’s very old school in many ways: beautiful cinematography, big ensemble cast of mostly unfamiliar faces who seem very natural, an emphasis on characters and moments over any sort of plot, a shockingly low amount of conflict. It’s about a huge family get-together and involves multiple age groups but the movie it most reminds me of is AMERICAN GRAFFITI. Probly not coincidentally the cast features a couple children of George Lucas’s friends (Francesca Scorsese and Sawyer Spielberg).

Of course, that led to a horrifying realization that AMERICAN GRAFFITI was set 11 years before the time of its release, while this is set sometime in the aughts, so it’s more like 20 years ago, but doesn’t seem like it. The biggest differences are flip phones and one family still has a station wagon with faux-wood paneling. It kinda feels timeless though because the music is much older and the fashions aren’t very aggressive. It could almost be five years ago, or thirty, or forty.

It’s about I guess three generations of the Balsano family all convening in the Long Island house many of them grew up in. I can’t imagine ever having this much family in one place, but it kinda tricks me into thinking I know this feeling. We arrive in the car with one of the families and don’t really need to know who everybody is – it’s lots of cousins, lots of grandkids, some of them clearly played by real siblings running around doing real kid stuff. It’s kinda like we’re just people there mingling, because we hear parts of different conversations, don’t necessarily have context or know who they’re talking about. But they know each other and they know their traditions, like they all know when to put on their coats and walk out to some place where the fire trucks drive by with Christmas lights on them. Big excitement for them, mostly impressionistic for us. Like a memory of seeing something like that when you’re too young to really understand.

It really captures that feeling of cousins or adult siblings – people who go way back and feel close but only see each other a couple times a year. The older men stand outside the garage smoking, the kids sequester themselves upstairs and get obnoxious, older ones showing off playing video games, younger ones watching in awe. 

A standout character is Cousin Bruce (Chris Lazzaro, JERSEY SHORE MASSACRE), a goofball who’s a volunteer firefighter and makes a big emotional toast to the family about how proud he was to be on the fire truck earlier because he always wanted to be an actor. It starts out seeming kind of pathetic and embarrassing but somehow he turns it around so I was kinda like “Cousin Bruce is a good guy, I hope he’s happy.”

There’s also Uncle Ray (Tony Savino, NIGHT OF VIOLENCE), who mostly fits the stereotypes of working class east coast macho guys of a previous generation, but early on there’s kind of a cute surprise that he has a passion for writing fiction and, to paraphrase Erykah Badu, he’s an artist and he’s sensitive about his shit. It doesn’t necessarily seem like something that will come up again and I kinda forgot about it by the time of maybe the best scene, when one of the relatives drunkenly picks up his manuscript not knowing what it is, reading it out loud mockingly, sending us on an unpredictable roller coaster ride of emotions.

I’m not gonna list the whole cast because there are so many of them, most of them aren’t known from anything else, and we don’t really hear many of their names. But if you want to argue someone is the central character it might be Emily (Matilda Fleming, who they should keep in mind for playing the young version of a Rooney Mara character), the teenage daughter of the family we ride in with. Maybe it just feels that way because so much is expressed by the looks on her face. She’s at an age where she doesn’t really want to hang out with the little kids in her family, but also rejects the adults, especially her mother (Maria Dizzia, CAPTAIN PHILLIPS), who she refuses to pass the rolls to. She does have a cousin (?) she’s close to, Michelle (Scorsese, just as charming as an actor as she is in those videos she makes with her dad), and in the second half they’re able to sneak out with their friends for teenage adventures driving around, trying to get beer, and making out in snow-covered cars. I like that they break the law and drive recklessly and mess around with boys (and girls) but the whole thing feels wholesome, not cautionary. Again it feels like a memory, looking back on those days, when luckily nobody got hurt.

One of the few actors I recognized was Elsie Fisher (EIGHTH GRADE, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2022) as the girl Michelle likes and asks to meet up with them after she gets off work. The diner where the kids hang out is totally hoppin on Christmas Eve. I hope they’re tipping well.

There’s a sad undercurrent throughout, but I think in the sense of not being able to fully enjoy the good times in the moment because you’re worried they won’t last. There’s one potential bit of drama involving disagreements about whether or not to sell Mom’s house. It becomes a little dicey later on when some of the siblings are getting drunk and resentments come out in cryptic rants, but I’m not sure it’s a spoiler to say that it never really blows up. Be comfortable knowing this isn’t that kind of movie. Maybe there’s a bit of THE TREE IN LIFE in there that it reflects the little things you remember more than the exact moments that add together to create a traditional story.

Director Tyler Taormina is from Long Island, as one would guess from the movie. It would be weird if he wasn’t. This is his third movie after HAM ON RYE (2019) and HAPPER’S COMET (2022). He wrote it with his usual partner Eric Berger, and Kevin Anton gets a “story editor” credit. Anton is also the editor editor so I’m thinking it’s a very improvisational movie that was restructured in post-production. But that’s just my speculation. At any rate I do appreciate the editing here, there are some pretty brilliant transitions, like the scene where Emily is off with her friends and she looks up in the sky, and it cuts back to the house with her mother standing over the decorative Christmas village, so for half a second it seems like she’s a giant looking down at her daughter from above.

Michael Cera is one of the producers, which makes it kinda funny that his supporting role as one of a pair of beat cops (along with Gregg Turkington, TENACIOUS D IN THE PICK OF DESTINY) is pretty similar to Seth Rogen’s part in SUPERBAD. I guess he’s graduated. His cop is stranger than Rogen’s was, though, so maybe the graduation is more from straight man to weirdo.

Another movie this reminded me of was EEPHUS, which I now realize is coming out of the same scene – its director Carson Lund is the cinematographer and producer of this one and co-founded the Omnes Films collective with Taormina when they went to Emerson College together. The company’s websight says that “Our films are passionate, ambitious works made by friends that favor atmosphere over plot and study the many forms of cultural decay in the 21st century.” Yep, that describes both of these!

I never reviewed EEPHUS but it’s a really good hangout movie about a group of small town recreational baseball players just having their last game before the field they play on is shut down due to skullduggery. It’s very funny and a nice celebration of people doing a thing for laughs and camaraderie rather than money or glory. Also reminded me quite a bit of LAST NIGHT AT THE ALAMO.

If I were forced to pick the best of these two movies I’d actually go with the baseball one. But if you’re reading this in December and want a Christmas movie that’s light but not frothy, artful but not pretentious, honest but not heavy, fun but not silly, and looks like a Real Fuckin Movie, not at all a Hallmark one (as much as I enjoy that crap), then shit I really have to recommend CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER’S POINT to you, don’t I? I don’t think it would ever enter my holiday rotation but I do think there’s something special about it.