CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER’S POINT
Written and directed by Tyler Taormina
107 minutes, rated M
Reviewed by JAKE WILSON
★★★½

Almost any randomly chosen shot from Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point would be enough to confirm the movie takes place around Christmas. Where the season is concerned, this third feature from American independent filmmaker Tyler Taormina has all the trimmings: twinkling coloured lights, stockings by the fire, 1950s crooners on the soundtrack, Santa hats, candy canes, a small dog gazing out of the window at falling snow.

The plot may equally sound like a matter of familiar routine. Several generations of a large middle-class family have gathered for their annual celebration in suburban New York in the mid-2000s (the era isn’t spelt out right away, but we can deduce it from indicators like primitive mobile phones).

Unfolding over a few hours, the action is given enough of a nostalgic glow to suggest Taormina, born in Long Island in 1990, might be drawing on idealised memories of his own youth. This doesn’t mean tension is absent: behind closed doors, a group of adult siblings angrily debate whether the house they’re in needs to be sold, which would mean the occasion we’re witnessing is the last of its kind.

This is a film about the idea of tradition that sticks to a set of recognisable conventions – which can be said of any Christmas movie when you think it over. Yet, it’s also much odder and more original than this synopsis indicates. To start with, there’s no single main character: we’re introduced to dozens of people over the course of the film, and Taormina makes no effort to ensure we can keep track of them all, let alone figure out how they’re all related.

If anything he courts confusion, cutting abruptly between fragmentary vignettes and making wilfully disorienting use of zooms and pans. Few of the plot points that are set up are ever resolved, and the dialogue is full of non sequiturs such as a discussion of an online community of “people who are animals” (it’s hard to judge how much of this material is improvised or which members of the largely unknown cast are professionals).

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In its mixture of wooziness and cosiness, and its use of techniques such as overlapping dialogue, Christmas in Miller’s Point harks back to the work of the late Robert Altman, who played his own games with convention throughout his long career. But unlike Altman, Taormina is no satirist, even if he brings in Michael Cera and Gregg Turkington as a couple of brain-dead cops on the sidelines of the story.

Rather, the film seems like the work of a very knowing director aiming to recapture emotions linked to childhood and adolescence, including both an innocent sense of wonder and a more mundane kind of uncertainty about what’s really going on. The upshot is a film that feels familiar and baffling at once – which may be exactly what Taormina wants.