At first glance, there’s some reason to be suspicious of this film, with its possible nepo shenanigans. It’s about an extended blue collar family with a tinge of crime … and it features Francesca Scorsese, daughter of Martin. It’s also about the teeming warmth of a suburban American home, whose inhabitants seem on the verge of something epiphanic … and it features Sawyer Spielberg, son of Steven. But for all the influence-anxiety that anything like this carries with it, this is a very charming and rich movie, teeming with ambient detail, from very original and distinctive film-maker Tyler Taormina, whose previous picture Ham on Rye I very much admired.
Despite or because of the fact that almost nothing really happens in any conventionally dramatic sense, and that what might in another movie be considered background establishing detail here pretty much carries on for an hour and three quarters until the closing credits, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is unexpectedly beguiling and engrossing, with an almost experimental refusal of narrative in its normal sense. Like Ham on Rye, it is about hometown values, and the overwhelming but unquantifiable importance of that place where you started your life.
The scene is a Christmas Eve party in a family home in Long Island; the interiors are shot and lit in a way that suggests the late 70s or early 80s, with ochres and browns and yellows. But mobile phones and video games suggest the early or mid-00s. There is a colossal family gathering, at which a widowed grandma (Mary Reistetter) sits impassively, apparently having suffered a stroke at some stage in the past. Her middle-aged children preside over a gigantic meal: Ronald (Steve Alleva), Ray (Tony Savino), Elyse (Maria Carucci) and Kathleen (Maria Dizzia), along with a raft of teens and little kids. There is a huge amount of eating, drinking and singing. At one stage the whole group, along with the rest of the neighbourhood, troops out to witness a procession, treated as reverently as a comet or supernatural event: it’s a drive-past of emergency vehicles, including a fire truck on which is to be seen the beaming Cousin Bruce (Chris Lazzaro), a volunteer firefighter who has been at the party but has somehow absented himself to get aboard this convoy. There’s also the traditional “walk”, which the grownups go in for near midnight; and after that, the young people semi-officially sneak out to drink, hang out and pair off in a scene not unlike the climax of Ham on Rye.
But there’s a problem, represented in the single scene which is the nearest thing this film has to an intelligible dramatic event. The grownup children gather in a bedroom and tensely argue about what is to be done with their ailing mother; one says that he can no longer deal with caring for her alone and suggests residential care, and a furious row ensues. But the implication is clear. The grandma will probably need to go into a care home – which means selling this house which has been the venue for this legendary annual feast. So what we’re seeing is happening for the last time.
Or is it? The film is structured and textured in such a way that this (possible) meaning is blurred. Maybe it isn’t the last ever Christmas party here. Maybe it will just carry on, with an annual tense family argument about elder care and money, as traditional as everything else. Meanwhile two cops, played by Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington, hang around in their squad car, as ineffectual as the police in Superbad, failing – among many other things – to act on their feelings for each other.
Like Taormina’s other work, there is something weirdly mysterious and even exalted about this film, with its flashes and mosaic-fragments of dialogue and detail. It might resemble other family dramas, but there’s a hum of something strange underneath, a sense that life is about surrendering to the infinite flow of events.
• Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point screened at the Cannes film festival.
