This Recent Flick With Francesca Scorsese Is the Most Touching Christmas Movie of the Year
A big family celebrates their last Christmas in their childhood home on Long Island.
Imagine that while cleaning your rented apartment, you suddenly find a VHS tape with someone's memories on it. You see strangers gathering in a large house to celebrate Christmas.
You don't know who these people are, but their images seem painfully familiar. As if you were once in the same room, sipping sickly sweet orange juice. Meanwhile, the clock hands approach the long-awaited midnight.
This is the feeling that the movie Christmas Eve in Miller's Point gives you.
What Is Christmas Eve in Miller's Point About?
It's Christmas Eve in the early 2000s. Four generations of the Italian-American Balsano family gather in a large house on Long Island. As the grandmothers kiss their grandchildren, the older children set the table and share news.
It is clear from the conversations that the issue of moving the family matriarch, silent grandmother Antonia, into a nursing home is on the agenda. While the older relatives argue, the younger ones try to stay awake so as not to miss Santa's arrival.
Meanwhile, the older children plan a little escape – somewhere in the parking lot, not far from the local donut shop, cousins Emily and Michelle are waiting with friends for some real Christmas entertainment.
Christmas Eve in Miller's Point Is a Movie for Those Who Miss the 2000s
Director Tyler Taormina maneuvers between generations, showing how perceptions of the holiday change with age.
The little ones wait for the gift hour; the teenagers click buttons on a brand new flip phone, hoping to run off to join their peers; the adults pour wine, sing Jingle Bells and, of course, gossip about everything; and the grandmothers quietly enjoy the noise, sadly assuming that this may be their last holiday together.
And yet, the movie's target audience is obvious – above all, yesterday's children and today's parents, namely those who are now in their early thirties, are longing for the recently passed era of the 2000s.
Christmas Eve in Miller's Point Is Painfully Relatable
Taormina's film is not a glossy postcard or a timeless classic like It's a Wonderful Life. In fact, it's not even a holiday movie, but rather a bittersweet stroll through fading memories.
The camera floats around the house, capturing fragments that help the viewer form a portrait of the family. Blurry, slow-motion garlands and car headlights interrupt the jagged narrative, and faces are lost behind tinsel and scraps of bright wrapping paper that someone threw in.
The 2000s are long gone, the old garlands no longer glow, the houses have been sold or lost their former appearance, the relatives have moved away.
Memories fade, turning into a series of random fragments that are remembered only because they were occasionally scrolled through in the mind. Christmas Eve in Miller's Point is a video album of snippets of memories of one of the Christmas evenings of each of us.