What to Watch: "Christmas Eve at Miller's Point"
An eccentric new Christmas classic from a young director to watch. Plus: reviews of "Hard Truths," "Nightbitch," "Flow" and "Queer."
“Like a cross between ‘Amarcord’ and ‘Twin Peaks’” is how Mrs. Movie Critic described “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) after we watched it last week, and that’s a pretty accurate description, if slightly more sinister-sounding than the film is, which is not at all. For a lot of us in the writing-about-movies business, “Miller’s Point” seems to have come out of nowhere, blending in with the infestation of Christmas-themed movies that clutter up the streaming landscape at this time of year*. Richard Brody’s glowing review in The New Yorker caught me and many others by surprise, and then I remembered that I’d seen something about the movie a few months ago, noted that it was by a young director whose work I admired, then promptly forgot about it. The culpa is mea.
That director is Tyler Taormina, Long Island-raised, Emerson College-educated, who with other members of his Emerson mafia – notably cinematographer/director Carson Lund – started the Omnes Film Collective, whose online statement of purpose goes like this: “Our mission is to fill a void in modern cinema. Our films are passionate, ambitious works made by friends that favor atmosphere over plot and study the many forms of cultural decay in the 21st century. Whatever the subject or genre, we seek projects that are original in conception and feel like they’ve never been made before.” Ah, youth.
Okay, then, and true enough, Taormina’s 2019 feature debut, “Ham on Rye” is like nothing that’s been made before, a handmade, atmospheric drama about small-town teens who gather ritualistically at a local diner prior to vanishing from the face of the Earth. I teed up “Ham on Rye” earlier this week for paid subscribers, and now that “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” has finished its theatrical run and is available for a $6.99 rental from Amazon Prime and Apple TV, I direct you to it forthwith.
It’s a hard movie to describe if only because it seems to resemble every home-for-the-holidays drama ever made, but you immediately pick up on subterranean dissonances and bits of poetic oddness. The focus is a big, noisy Italian American clan in the suburbs of Long Island – the film was shot in and around Smithtown, NY – as everybody piles into grandma’s house for the annual Christmas Eve dinner. Grandma (Mary Reistetter) is a largely silent figure in a rocking chair on the glassed-in porch, and her oldest son (John Trischetti Jr.), who lives in the house with his family, tells his brothers and sisters it’s time to sell.
They respond to this with differing intonations of dismay, and if any of the characters hold the camera more than the others, it’s Kathleen (Maria Dizzia), who struggles to keep seasonal melancholy at bay and whose teenage daughter Emily (Matilda Fleming) is deep into the tunnel of adolescent surliness. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” keeps widening its gaze and wandering off to the sidelines, ducking down to the basement with the grandkids recovering a giant iguana from behind the furnace, or following Emily when she sneaks out to go cruising with a bunch of aimless, happy school friends, or peeking in for a visit with the local cops (Michael Cera, who also co-produced, and Gregg Turkington), a deadpan pair of LEOs who possibly have a thing for each other.
Taormina has the gift of suffusing his bland setting and everyday characters with benevolent mystery. Almost every one of the seemingly endless supply of wives, dads, nephews, aunts, neighbors, teenagers, and those guys in their late 20s who hang out in the cemetery smoking gets a moment of defining and alluring individuality, whether it’s Kathleen’s blowhard brother (Tony Savino), who’s nursing a secret literary streak, or her young son (Justin Longo), who possesses a quiet, observational intelligence that sets him apart from his cousins – or that one relative (Chris Lazzaro) who’s done jail time for something stupid he did when he was young and is still trying to get back on his feet.
It’s a film that feels made by a middle-class outsider artist – or artists, plural, since Carson Lund’s luminous cinematography contributes so much to the vibe and the whole thing feels crowdsourced by a cast and crew on the same anthropological wavelength. “Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point” has moments of high humor (an elderly sleeping aunt sent up and down the stairs in a motorized lift) and hushed mystery (the annual firetruck Santa dashing by in a blurry dance of light and sound), but its bass note is one of disquiet at time’s passing, at people growing up and away and old, gifts ungiven, talents unpursued, family loved and leaving. It’s a strange and beautiful movie, and I hope you get to see it.
(Note: A film this un-peggable is always a chore for the marketing department, which has to make the trailer play like something familiar on the theory that no one will pay to see something that looks different. The preview below, which tries and fails to capture the evanescent tone of "Miller's Point," is a case in point.)
Also arriving in theaters this weekend, two movies I saw at the Toronto International Film Festival:
“Hard Truths” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) – Mike Leigh is back in the modern-day bed-sits of England after some time exploring the period epic. Marianne Jean-Baptiste is downright brilliant – Oscar-level good – as Pansy, a woman whose vitriolic anger toward the world, expressed as a constant and hilariously inventive sense of complaint, masks a profound sadness whose wellsprings remain a mystery. A rich portrait of London’s middle-class Black community, with warm supporting performances – Michele Austin is a standout as Pansy’s sister, the sun to her midnight moon – and a gorgeous string score. Longtime fans of the director may notice that Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy is almost the diametric opposite of Sally Hawkins’ Poppy in Leigh’s “Happy-Go-Lucky” (2008) – one flower wilts while the other blooms.
"Nightbitch" (⭐ ⭐ ⭐) – The challenge when turning any book into a movie is extracting the filmmaker’s show from the writer’s tell, and this adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s novel – about an existentially exhausted new mother (Amy Adams) who fantasizes (or does she?) about metamorphizing into a wild dog – errs on the side of telling. But not too much: It’s still an entertaining and scarifying ride through a suburban zombieland of Music Together classes, Baby Mama Yoga, sleepless nights and loss of self, and Adams gives it her all. It’s scripted and directed by the gifted Marielle Heller (“Can You Ever Forgive Me?”), with good support from Scoot McNairy as Adams’ husband – a tricky role pulled off with finesse, although some are arguing that he gets off too easy while others are arguing that he doesn't get off easy enough.
My Washington Post reviews this week, for the wonderful animated film “Flow” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ ⭐) and Luca Guadagnino’s "Queer” (⭐ ⭐ ⭐ 1/2) with its bravura performance by Daniel Craig, can be read below the paywall.
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*Christmas titles currently playing on Netflix
“Christmas with You”
“Christmas Inheritance”
“Christmas in the Heartland”
“Falling for Christmas”
“Meet Me Next Christmas”
“Christmas Island”
“Christmas Crossfire”
“Christmas on Mistletoe Farm”
“Operation Christmas Drop”
“Christmas on Cherry Lane”
“Christmas Full of Grace”
“Christmas in Notting Hill”
“Holiday in the Wild”
“Christmas with a Kiss”
“Christmas as Usual”
“A Biltmore Christmas”
“That Christmas”
“Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square”
“Father Christmas is Back”
“The Holiday Calendar”
“The Christmas Chronicles”
“A Bad Moms Christmas”
“Paris Christmas Waltz”
“The Knight Before Christmas”
“The Christmas Chronicles: Part Two”
“A Christmas Prince”
“Best Christmas. Ever!”
“Christmas Love”
“Merry Christmas”
“A Castle for Christmas”
“A Merry Scottish Christmas”
“A Boy Called Christmas”
“Angela’s Christmas”
“A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding”
“A Very Murray Christmas”
“My Dad’s Christmas Date”
“Jingle Jangle: A Christmas Journey”
“A California Christmas”
“5 Star Christmas”
“Just Another Christmas”
“A Christmas Prince: The Royal Baby”
“A Not So Merry Christmas”
“The Boss Baby: Christmas Bonus”
“Grumpy Christmas”
“Feast of the Seven Fishes”
“An Unremarkable Christmas”
“A California Christmas: City Lights”
