Directed By Tyler Taormina

Starring – Matilda Fleming, Maria Dizzia, Ben Shenkman

The Plot – On Christmas Eve, a family gathers for what could be the last holiday in their ancestral home. As the night wears on and generational tensions arise, one of the teenagers sneaks out with her friends to claim the wintry suburb for her own.

Rated PG-13 for strong adult language, teen drinking, some suggestive material and smoking.

Christmas Eve In Miller’s Point – Official Trailer | IFC Films

POSITIVES

In terms of its exaggeratedly surrealist gimmick, ‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’ effectively evokes not only the manic hysteria within the environment of so many relatives congregating under one roof, but also the nostalgic warmth and glowing ambiance of the Christmas season as a kid, which it uses to paint these abstractly broad strokes of artistic expression that can be felt with immersive photography of what it felt like to be that age experiencing something so unexplainably euphoric. This makes the film an experimental one, where it evidently feels more concerned with the feelings and imagery of the family holiday experience rather than its storytelling depth, but the memories of Taormina’s youth supplanting such infectious warmth during the Winter season vividly live on the mind of the director’s essentially timeless execution, if not for a few spare shots involving outdated cell phones, all the while inspiring him to enact more than a few dreamy sequences of exhilarating ecstasy during firetruck parades or Christmas lit neighborhoods from a child’s perspective, courtesy of lucidly grainy deviations in the frame rate that deduces them to these colorful strokes that clutter the canvas. Taormina’s direction constantly maintains the sugar-rushed energy that seamlessly reflects these delicately fragile family interactions, with constant urgency in both the sporadic editing choices and pacing of the pocketed interactions that intentionally overwhelm the audience from the movie’s first frame, and though this makes it difficult to get a firm grasp on these characters and their respective conflicts, it outlines a significance of importance to the night that makes everything else going on in their lives feel less important, despite the eventual inevitability of some unfortunate events looming in the distance. This affords the film the freedom to explore as many characters and conversations as desired, particularly against the will of a 100-minute run time that could seemingly narrow that accessibility, and though much is still to be desired in the limited characterizations between them, the naturalism of the dialogue helps to take some of the sting away, with an overall absence of heavy-handed exposition that could compromise the subtle documentary feel that the movie has going for it. Speaking of naturalism, we hear it so often, but the family house is a character of its own in this movie, with a lived-in brand of believability to the extensive decoration, Christmas ornaments and furnishings, too particular to feel spontaneous with the production. This feels like the single biggest aspect of Taormina’s memory, as every room has its own intended purpose to stand out tangibly to the influence of the characters, and though it’s your typical Jersey colonial in the suburbs, the surveilling of the cinematography makes it feel never-ending, stretching to the deepest and most intimate corridors for personal reflection during the rare times the dramatics of the aforementioned conflicts begin to take shape. Lastly, this is obviously an ensemble piece, with limited opportunity for standing out, however I think the collective efforts from this involving so much subtlety and nuance to their respective portrayals help enable the rare captivity of us seeing them simply as characters, instead of actors portraying such. While the lack of a major discernable star between them is most effective towards suppressing the distraction of such, with ‘Eighth Grade’s’ Elsie Fisher, or Michael Cera being the biggest name involved, each of their commitments to personality and psychology allows each of them to feel so emotionally and creatively balanced between them, despite the abundance of speaking roles contained that could easily make any two characters feel interchangeable. Each character fits their own prioritized mold, based on what the family demands from them, and with some of their personalities enacting such bizarre and unchained demeanors, it’s inevitable that at least one of them will remind you of somebody in the excesses of your family tree.

NEGATIVES

Like a night inside with family, the film does overstay its welcome quite early in the engagement, with a lack of effectively consistent comedy and storytelling structure that makes it difficult to invest to madness in scenes that feels so spontaneously disconnected from one another. I say this because the aforementioned plot is all of the exploration that you’re going to receive in these characters and their respective conflicts, even with occasional hinting in the dialogue towards individualized issues that the script never digs deeper towards, and though loose scripts can occasionally work towards gimmick-driven films, here the repetition of deviating between these pocketed dynamics becomes tedious as a result of so very little development of the characters initiated between them, making it not only difficult to invest in any of these people as compelling leads, but also flatlined on the pacing, which began to wither on my investment at about the forty minute mark of the proceedings. It also can’t even follow the rules of its own claustrophobic captivity, as a teenage character leaves the party around the film’s halfway point, and the script focuses dominantly overwhelming towards this introduced arc of her following to cause debauchery with her friends, instead of spend the night with those who love her most. Call it perhaps an intended direction of articulating the selfishness of teenagers, for underappreciating the limited time she will have with her family, but seemingly there’s no lesson learned for her, nor a worthwhile reason to pursue new characters surrounding her at this late point of the film, and an already taxing engagement nose dives even further with an inferior second half so abstract that it feels like Wes Anderson and David Lynch teamed up to helm it, and not in the charmingly specific ways that makes each of those directors special. As for the humor, the realities of me only laughing twice throughout the engagement should tell you everything that you need to know about the lack of confidence or momentum material, but even structurally, there’s nothing here in set-up or delivery that feels particularly innovative or even edgingly daring to push the boundaries of a PG-13 rating, so instead the material phones it in with off-beat responses from the ensemble that at least initially feel like the right kind of cutesy charming towards garnering a reaction of any kind, but eventually fall by the wayside of disappointingly flat, as a result of a failure to evolve that prove so very little time and effort that went into their audience appeal. Finally, the film can’t even escape hinderances of the technical variety, as sloppy filmmaking to the movie’s presentational factors creates unforeseen conflicts of its own to the engagement that are sure to cut directly into audience investment, especially with one constant gaffe or snafu that I can’t believe post-production didn’t spot. Two scenes, one during the firetruck parade, and the other involving the duo of police officers interacting with a trio of drug dealers, involve a boom microphone protruding the integrity of the scene’s framing outline, as clear as day, with a far greater elevation of dialogue than interior scenes during the party, where the dialogue is smothered by the movie’s boisterously intrusive sound levels in soundtrack. On that front, I did enjoy the doo-wop selections of 50’s and 60’s favorites played during the party of this Italian-American family, with popular tracks proving that the production spent ample money conjuring an atmosphere, but at the cost of clarity for dialogue that has trouble distinguishing itself against such invasive imposition. There are times away from the party where it momentarily improves, but considering most of the film is contained within the community sections of the house, it persists more than I would’ve preferred, smothering many of ensemble opportunities, with some only being given a spare instance at such.

OVERALL
‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’ does give something nostalgically nourishing to unwrap for audience consumption, but the moment becomes compromised with strange creative decisions and alienating production values that makes this a muddled excursion down memory road. Though naturalism is effortlessly attained in everything from the seamlessness of the performances to the lived-in visuals and freneticism of the party, the exploration of these characters and their respective conflicts is surface level shallow, at best, with a lack of entertainment value that brandishes a lump of coal, instead of the luminating diamond of being the next big Christmas classic.

My Grade: 5/10 or D