Summary
A nostalgic but understated slice-of-life captures a Long Island family’s fading traditions on a winter’s night.
Many households have Christmas Eve traditions, and ours involves burritos—a practice I inherited from my partner for reasons too esoteric to explain here. For Ham on Rye director Tyler Thomas Taormina, those traditions come from growing up on Long Island, New York.
Despite the title, CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER’S POINT isn’t strictly a Christmas film; rather, it’s a film about a family set at Christmas—or, more specifically, Christmas Eve. The exact year is never mentioned, though we gather from contextual clues that it’s set in the early 2000s.
Yet there’s a timeless quality to it. The players, conversations, and rituals feel like they could exist anywhere, at any time. Amidst the cosy trappings and copious amounts of food, though, change is in the air. The Balsano family are on the cusp of selling the home that has been with the clan seemingly forever. Restless teens, meanwhile, escape for a night of driving around town.
Not much happens over the course of the night; it’s crafted more as an observational ‘hangout’ picture. Overlapping conversations fill the living room, and Secret Santa gifts are exchanged. The night’s highlight comes when what seems like the entire neighbourhood runs outside into the cold to catch a glimpse of the local fire truck, racing past in a blurry light display. An interlude with teens, video games, and a giant lizard in a basement feels like it’s stepped in from another film entirely.
Taormina’s stylistic choices add to the film’s tonal quirks. Interior scenes are wrapped in a warming blanket of classic tunes from another era, featuring 1940s and ’50s lounge tracks. The sporadic use of slow motion and long exposures adds an almost eerie atmosphere, especially when Taormina cuts between drunken teens driving and two taciturn cops (played, in barely-there cameos, by Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington). It creates an expectation of a crash or tragedy, but this bubble remains unbroken.
Towards the end, a poignant scene unfolds as one family member reads aloud from a novel-in-progress. What begins with mocking laughter shifts into an unexpectedly heartfelt moment, the reader and audience alike recognising the poignancy in the words as the room falls silent—a fleeting moment of clarity.
While I’m not entirely ready for early 2000s nostalgia just yet, Taormina’s film is clearly steeped in it. As the film ends, with no major dramas or revelations, merely looking in through a window at a family scene, we sense that this was an attempt to bottle something already slipping into the past.
2024 | USA | DIRECTOR: Tyler Thomas Taormina | WRITERS: Eric Berger, Tyler Thomas Taormina | CAST: Matilda Fleming, Maria Dizzia, Ben Shenkman, Francesca Scorsese, Elsie Fisher, Lev Cameron, Sawyer Spielberg, Gregg Turkington, Michael Cera | DISTRIBUTOR: Rialto Distribution (Australia), IFC Films (USA) | RUNNING TIME: 106 minutes | RELEASE DATE: 8 November 2024 (USA), 14 November 2024 (Australia)
