‘Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point’ Review: A Sweet, Nostalgic Love Letter to Suburban Holiday-Season Rituals
17.05.2024 - 12:25
/ variety.com
Jessica Kiang (Baby) It’s cold outside. Strings of gaudy rainbow lights twinkle from gables.
In cozy living rooms, grandmothers and great aunts doze in their chairs while middle-aged siblings bicker and booze it up around the dining table. Little kids squirm in makeshift beds trying to stay awake for Santa, while truculent teenagers sneak out into the suburban night to do secret teenager things.
Ok, so there are no chestnuts roasting on an open fire — instead there is a salad bowl full to the gluttonous brim with red and green M&Ms — but in almost every other respect Tyler Taormina‘s delightful stocking-stuffer “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” is as alive to the domesticated magic of holiday tradition as any Nat King Cole seasonal classic. And probably even more so: Taormina’s fondly multivalent, Millennial-Norman-Rockwell perspective incorporates a child’s experience of the holiday, overlaid with a teen’s and a parent’s and a grandparent’s and a cousin’s and an in-law’s and so on.
It feels as though all his Christmases have come at once. It is sometime in the early 2000s and the chattering ensemble that represents four sprawling generations of the Italian-American Balsano family, is loosely centered on one of its many tangled branches.
Teenager Emily (Matilda Fleming) is at That Age and engaged in an unexplained war of sulky attrition with her mother Kathleen (Maria Dizzia), while her father (Ben Shenkman) drily steels himself for an evening with the in-laws as they drive to Kathleen’s family home on Long Island. En route they pass by a police cruiser in which the world’s two most ineffectual traffic cops, played by Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington, sit in a silence that is loaded, as we’ll later discover, with
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