Miller’s Point Christmas Eve review – a charming family study in its hometown is an extended celebration | Movies

At first glance, there are reasons to be wary of this film, with its possible nepo shenanigans. It’s about a blue-collar extended family with a tinge of crime…and it stars Francesca Scorsese, Martin’s daughter. It is also about the teeming heat of an American suburban house, whose inhabitants seem on the verge of something epiphanic… and features Sawyer Spielberg, Steven’s son. But for all the influence and anxiety that this whole genre brings, this is a very charming and rich film, full of ambient detail, from the very original and distinctive filmmaker Tyler Taormina, whose work I greatly admired. previous film Ham on Rye. .

Despite or because of the fact that almost nothing actually happens in a conventional dramatic sense, and what might in another film be considered a background establishing detail continues here for an hour and three quarters until the closing credits, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point. is surprisingly seductive and captivating, with an almost experimental refusal of narrative in its normal sense. Like Ham on Rye, it’s about the values ​​of your hometown and the overwhelming but unquantifiable importance of this place where you started your life.

The scene is a Christmas Eve party at a family home on Long Island; the interiors are photographed and lit in a way that suggests the late 70s or early 80s, with ochres, browns and yellows. But cell phones and video games suggest the early to mid-2000s. There’s a colossal family reunion, at which a widowed grandmother (Mary Reistetter) sits impassively, having apparently suffered a stroke at a given moment in the past. His middle-aged children preside over a gigantic meal: Ronald (Steve Alleva), Ray (Tony Savino), Elyse (Maria Carucci) and Kathleen (Maria Dizzia), accompanied by a group of teenagers and small children. There is plenty to eat, drink and sing. At one point, the whole group, along with the rest of the neighborhood, gathers to witness a procession, treated with as much respect as a comet or a supernatural event: it is a passage of vehicles of emergency, including a fire truck on which must be I saw cousin Bruce (Chris Lazzaro), a volunteer firefighter who was present at the party, but who absented himself to board this convoy. There is also the traditional “walk”, in which adults participate around midnight; and after that, the young people go out unofficially to drink, hang out and hook up in a scene not unlike the climax of Ham on Rye.

But there is a problem, represented in the single scene that is the closest thing this film has to an intelligible dramatic event. The adult children gather in a room and tensely discuss what to do with their sick mother; one of them says he can no longer care for her alone and suggests institutionalization, and a furious argument ensues. But the implication is clear. The grandmother will probably have to go to a retirement home, which means selling this house that hosted this legendary annual party. What we see therefore happens for the last time.

Where is it? The film is structured and textured in such a way that this (possible) meaning is blurred. This may not be the last Christmas here. Perhaps it will continue, with a tense annual family argument over 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 ineffective as the police in Superbad, unable – among other things – to act on their feelings for each other. other.

As in Taormina’s other works, there is something strangely mysterious and even exalted about this film, with its flashes and mosaic fragments of dialogue and detail. It may sound like other family dramas, but there’s a strange hum underneath, the feeling that life is about surrendering to the endless flow of events.

• Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point screened at the Cannes Film Festival.