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Christmas Eve In Miller's Point: The Charming Anti-Fiction Of Festive Gatherings

Tyler Taormina’s <em>Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point </em>is a personal and naturalistic portrait of the holiday season.

Rahul+Desai

Nov 25, 2024

Poster for Christmas Eve in Miller's Point.

ESCAPISM is the default language of Christmas movies. Fiction is the refuge of festive-season stories. Miracles happen. Love blooms. Kids win. Parents panic. Over the years, though, this genre has mutated into a Hollywood supermarket product decked with cheap artifice and gift-wrapped for easy snacking. But Tyler Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is a welcome escape from that escapism.

The film is essentially a series of nostalgic vignettes at a Long Island Italian-American house. Three generations of the Balsano family are together — and it’s chatty. It’s basically 100 minutes of The Bear’s famous ‘Fishes’ episode if it were a gentle non-narrative night of revelry and low-stakes tensions. The story is rooted in the sheer lack of it; the film trusts the inherent, invisible and inevitable social machinations of voices, minds and egos meeting once a year. The men smoke cigars in the garage and discuss — argue about — a care home for their ageing matriarch. The teen cousins (which includes Martin Scorsese’s daughter, Francesca) get bored and sneak out to ‘rebel’ in the snowy town with their pals. The older cousins deliver tipsy speeches that aren’t half as profound as they imagine. The partners of the family members are amused by this annual circus of chaos. Two poker-faced cops keep an eye on the streets while concealing their feelings for each other. Everyone just exists.

Watching the film is not only like being invited to a big Christmas weekend, but also like — to quote The Office’s Andy Bernard — being in the good old days before you’ve actually left them. The nostalgia is actually tinged with melancholy: this is possibly the last Christmas at the ancestral home before it’s sold. The characters look like they’re living in the memories of those who are trying to remember that final weekend years later. It’s all a bit foggy, full of sensory moments that seem to have accumulated into surreal approximations of themselves over time. You can tell that the prickly moments have been edited out by the mind, and that the night is a blur of moods and vibes. The tedium of it all is humanised by hindsight — a bit like Aftersun without the heart-crushing heaviness. It reminded me of how I often try to remember the last New Year’s party in my childhood colony before we all moved on, only to arrive at a hazy assortment of nights instead. The point is nobody knew it’d be the last one in the moment. All that remains now is a whiff of deodorant, a stray riff of Aqua’s Barbie Girl a snatch of winter chill, the passing smell of chocolate cake.

Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is more coherent because there’s a distinct sense of finality: the adults of the family are aware that Christmases may never be the same again. Children sense (but ignore) that the night may never be repeated. The backseat kisses in a parking lot, the mischief at a store, the broken windshield, the beer bottles, the whiny waitress, the gratitude of having good friends and belonging. There are times I felt like reaching into the screen and imploring them to savour it. There are also times I felt like they were achingly alive to the transience of time — and Christmas itself. When a girl sees a person playing a piano in a dark room through a frosty window, it’s an image that will stay with her, for better or worse.

I first watched Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point at the 2024 MAMI Mumbai Film Festival. A strange thing happened there. As the film started and progressed, there was a palpable sense of anticipation in the hall. Most of us were conditioned to expect the calm of the opening stanza to break; something dramatic had to be around the corner. An axe murderer? An argument that spirals out of control? A twisted revelation? A drunken rampage? An hour in, red spots started to appear on the screen. I genuinely thought it was part of the film’s design — maybe this was a radical and psychedelic view of the night, maybe someone in the family put weed in the snacks, maybe it’s an experimental film. The spots kept coming and going. It looked funky. When viewers started leaving the hall, though, I realised that it was a glitch in the digital print. Given that nothing “happened” for so long, even a technical error looked like a stylistic choice. But this spoke more to our preconceived notions of flimsy Christmas cinema than to Taormina’s personal and naturalistic portrait of the holiday season. Nothing needed to happen because it was already happening. After all, life is a sequence of vibes that come disguised as patterns and stories. One person’s anti-fiction is another’s lived-in truth.

Christmas Eve in Miller's Point is now playing in theatres across India.