Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point review

Cannes film festival
There isn’t much plot in Tyler Taormina’s very charming and rich movie about one huge family’s festivities, but it’s engrossing, exalted even

At first glance, there’s some reason to be suspicious of this film, with its possible nepo shenanigans. It’s about an extended blue collar family with a tinge of crime … and it features Francesca Scorsese, daughter of Martin. It’s also about the teeming warmth of a suburban American home, whose inhabitants seem on the verge of something epiphanic … and it features Sawyer Spielberg, son of Steven. But for all the influence-anxiety that anything like this carries with it, this is a very charming and rich movie, teeming with ambient detail, from very original and distinctive film-maker Tyler Taormina, whose previous picture Ham on Rye I very much admired.

Despite or because of the fact that almost nothing really happens in any conventionally dramatic sense, and that what might in another movie be considered background establishing detail here pretty much carries on for an hour and three quarters until the closing credits, Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point is unexpectedly beguiling and engrossing, with an almost experimental refusal of narrative in its normal sense. Like Ham on Rye, it is about hometown values, and the overwhelming but unquantifiable importance of that place where you started your life.