‘Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point’ review: Michael Cera in a holiday film that breaks the mold without sacrificing joy

“Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point”

Courtesy of Cannes Directors’ Fortnight

Two features into his film career, it’s clear that director Tyler Taormina likes faces — but not in the way that Bergman or Cassavetes does. Unlike these paragons of art house, he does not isolate his characters to carefully examine their souls. He collects faces by the dozens and imagines crowded paintings.

His first movie, Rye ham, presented a mysterious and unsettling adolescent ritual in which the faces never connected to conventional stories. Five years later, Taormina is still drawing inspiration from group dynamics and still experimenting with the fusion of aesthetics and storytelling, but this time on more familiar territory. Sometimes veering toward sensory overload as it reconfigures the holiday gathering model, Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point can give the impression of a party that refuses to end, a party that could have used judicious rationalization. But it’s a memorable and adventurous celebration, fueled by intense hope, and Taormina’s affection for the characters is the beating heart of the film.

Filming in Suffolk County, on its native Long Island, with a cast that combines A-list actors and compelling non-professionals, Taormina made a Valentine for its Italian-American family, set in a fictional town rooted in everyday trinkets and recognizable psychology, but not quite of this world either. It’s a place where Santa’s bag of presents is a bag of discarded bagels, a Roomba and an iguana make memorable appearances, and the two useless police officers patrol the suburban streets like cheap versions of angels of Wings of Desire could at any time be arrested for impersonating law enforcement officers.

It’s also a story of endings and beginnings, dividing its attention between the revelry and worries of adults on the home front and the wild optimism of teenagers running off to wander, film the shit, and dream. There are also a lot of adorable kids who aren’t called upon to “play cute.” The screenplay by Taormina and Eric Berger deals with rather generic plots without dragging them into the stereotypical rhythms of explosion and resolution.

Director and cinematographer Carson Lund (who is also a member of the Omnes filmmaking collective and whose first feature film, Eephus, will also premiere at Cannes this year) evokes a kaleidoscopic vision of Christmas. Music supervisors Ollie White and Tom Stanford have concocted a soundtrack filled with old-school tunes (The Ronettes, Sinatra, Bay City Rollers) that evoke the holidays without being Christmas standards. Paris Peterson’s production design uses the setting of real-life families to evocative use, and the costumes, by Kimberly Odenthal, are a clever mix of parental celebration and rebellious adolescence.

Set to the dynamic ’60s music of Ricky Nelson’s “Fools Rush In,” the film opens with a rush of upside-down Christmas lights, a child’s point of view through the rear windshield of ‘a moving car. The child’s name is Andrew (Justin Longo), and he arrives with his parents and sister at “the old house,” the place where his mother, Kathleen (Maria Dizzia), and his siblings grew up. Dad Lenny (Ben Shenkman) exercises his “extended family face” in the car and, throughout the night, delivers the wry glances of a doting brother-in-law, in the fold but still watching. A kissing frenzy greets the arriving quartet, with Andrew a particular target of the lipstick aunts. Love overflows.

But the film has already established one of its central conflicts: the friction between teenager Emily (Matilda Fleming) and Kathleen, the exasperated target of her daughter’s endless hostility. There is also a notable impasse between Dizzia’s character and her mother, Antonia (Mary Reistetter): The hesitation with which Kathleen first approaches her suggests the uneasiness of a daughter-in-law who has never lived up to the impassive woman’s expectations. But no, it’s just the child who doesn’t visit her enough.

The second major conflict involves her son Matt’s (John J. Trischetti Jr.) certainty that it’s time to move Antonia to a nursing home. Along with his wife, Bev (Grege Morris), Matt cares for Antonia and observes her deterioration every day. Older brother Ray (Tony Savino) rejects her proposal, while older sister Elyse (Maria Carucci) hopes for some sort of common ground.

Not every conversation is as urgent as this one. With an Altmanian overlap of half-heard and half-finished dialogue (but without the Altmanesque boredom), the first half of the film revolves around chatter about real estate, law and order, love of country, love of family and children today, with random accents. philosophical asides. And sometimes Taormina just observes the body language of the interactions, the dialogue replaced by the energetic playlist of the soundtrack. Beneath all the immersion and games, the tables of food that stretch for miles, the endless Christmas decorations, the VHS journey into the past, gradually reveals the understanding that this will be the last such gathering in this house.

The storyline wastes no time on exposition, and like any first-time visitor (Brendan Burt plays a oh-so-bemused stranger, eyeing the ornate house’s cornucopia of kitsch with appreciation and disbelief), you probably won’t grasp all the relationships in this multi-generational reunion from the first viewing, at least not until the closing credits sequence equipped with useful visuals.

But you’ll probably fall in love with almost everyone in this sprawling set. With her unapologetic New York accent and her anger toward her son-in-law (Leo Chan), Elyse is irresistible. And how can you not kiss her husband, Ron (Steve Alleva), as he proudly points out that he “bleached” the green beans, or their son, Bruce (Chris Lazzaro), a volunteer firefighter with an indeterminate troubled past who makes a gushing but wise toast, or the widower Ray, who, with great pride and vulnerability, brings a secret creative project to his teenage nephew Ricky (Austin Lago).

With a talent like Dizzia on board, muted reactions at crucial moments make explanatory exchanges unnecessary. (My Christmas wish, if anyone asks, would be more films with this magnetic artist at their center.) Take the moment when Kathleen overhears her resentful daughter’s affectionate – and perhaps performative – ease with the exuberant Aunt Bev.

Early in the evening, Kathleen tells Elyse that Emily needs “a little magic.” And Taormina will certainly provide it when, about halfway through the film, Emily and her older, more sophisticated cousin Michelle (Francesca Scorsese) sneak out of the tradition-bound festivities with a couple of friends, Gabby Craig (Leo Hervey ) in the back seat and Sasha (Ava Francesca Renne) at the wheel of a vehicle that she has not yet mastered. Their group of Christmas Eve renegades grows with a stop at a bagel shop that’s a teenage hangout – link Miller’s Point to the sandwich setting of Rye ham. What unfolds from there begins with wild driving and turns into a winter night’s fantasy, complete with perfect snowfall, a storybook crescent moon, and a lone skater on a lake .

Throughout the film are scenes of the world’s two strangest cops (Gregg Turkington and Michael Cera, who also has a producer credit). In their costumed uniforms, braids and non-regulation facial hair, they are awkward and insistently impassive. As WTF narrative devices go, they provide a thin connecting thread, and a late confession between them has no significance to the story. The flirtations that cousins ​​Michelle and Emily pursue respectively with the characters played by Elsie Fisher and Tyler Diamond are much more convincing and seductive.

There is also the presence of three young people in their twenties (Sawyer Spielberg, Billy Mcshane, Gregory Falatek) who hang out in the cemetery. Craig considers them failures, but Taormina’s affection for them is obvious. His talent for observing the casual ignorance and cruelty of youth, as much as his sincere hunger and exuberance, makes me eager to see what he brings to the teen comedy format he would tackle next.

Fleming, in his first feature film role, hits fascinating notes of adolescent flint, desire and dizzying confusion. Whether she’s willing to admit it or not, she wants to be nicer. Emily views the family Christmas tree as an unwanted obligation, and she plays tough with her friends who argue over the holidays, but the small wrapped gift she carries with her for part of the night is a red emblem shining with contrition. At the end of her insurrectionary adventure, Lund and editor Kevin Anton produce an exquisite montage that connects Emily, in a parking lot in the middle of the night, and her mother, gazing at an elaborate doll’s house.

The adults in this Christmas story have abandoned the sense of immortality at the center of the universe that propels children, but they also have their rites of passage, their passions and reinventions, and their intertwined traditions. In the comic drama of Taormina’s beginnings and endings, there are gifts that are useless and others that matter, and it’s hard to have one without the other.